


Any Color You Like

by orphan_account



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 1980s, Adventure, Angst, Bullying, Coming of Age, Fake Character Death, Family Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Identity, Isolation, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, M/M, Miscommunication, Richie POV, Running Away, Self-Discovery, Slow Burn, Small Towns, Tenderness, side stanlon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 43,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25592017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Eddie's search for his long lost dad might just heal him. Tagging along might tear Richie in two.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 28
Kudos: 59





	1. tide

**Author's Note:**

> dedicated to gaz and milo. ♡

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summer 1989. Richie's had a revelation.

Richie knew he’d gone half-deaf when Eddie found him that night, that cataclysm in August ‘89, ‘cause he couldn’t catch a word of his lecture. You _always_ heard Eddie’s lectures. People on Jupiter could hear Eddie’s lectures. They were sitting facing each other on the hot, orange tile of Richie’s bathroom floor and there was a crease in Eddie’s brow deeper than space. “You have completely ruined yourself, you know,” was the only hiss of it he got. “You were doing totally fine and things were normal and then you just got up and said, ‘oh, I think I’m gonna ruin myself’.” 

The grandfather clock thumped for 10, out on the landing. Richie was wedged between the sink and bathtub like a sack of spuds. Yeah, that felt right. Big, dumb sack of spuds. 

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said, wincing. The skin on his temples and eyebrows stung like it was bitten. 

“Are you actually kidding?”

“No.” 

“You didn’t do this to yourself.”

“No!” 

Eddie’s eyes glowed virtually yellow. “Richie, you are going _bald_ ,” he said thinly. “You are balding and - and bright fucking _orange_. Maggie did that to you or what?!” 

Sometimes Eddie’s tone sort of crackled like they were on a telephone call, when he was mad. Or a really specific type of mad. The classic mad came out powerful on him; his brow would darken hard and his fists would curl tight and strong and it was all like watching a pre-strike python. The other sort, this sort, crackled. It struck something in Richie like the first, shaking D chord of a rock opera organ.

“Eddie,” he said seriously, the chord ringing in his head. “Something has happened to me.”

Eddie’s eyes stayed hard but something in the crinkles above them quirked. Confusion more than sympathy, probably, but there was something gentle in there. There kind of always was. “What happened to you, Richie?” He asked, and it was now Richie made out he was in a rock-star pose. Guitar solo kneel - all he needed was cheetah-print pants. 

This felt so disproportionately interesting for a moment that Richie forgot what he was going to say. Or at least lost all conviction in it. So he said, “there’s, like, bleach on me,” instead. 

“No shit, dude. You look like a scary Pam Anderson.” 

“I mean _on_ me. It’s in my ears.”

Another shift. Eddie was still wearing his hockey jersey, that night, ugly purple and gold. A Flaming Lips pin on the chest. The fabric squeaked and pinched all the hairs on his arms but he still wore it to bed. 

“This shit,” he said slowly, picking up the popped-open bottle of Tide between them. Looked a lot like Richie’s mom for a weird split second. “This shit is in your ear, right now?” 

Richie was telling the truth. He presumed he was telling the truth, at least. Just twenty five minutes ago he’d been combing his hair over the curve of the sink and pouring Tide over it like chocolate waffle sauce. Inspiration: Goodbye Cruel World scene from The Wall. Minus the bloody nipples. Double the meltdown. His hair had been sizzling a la one of those giant beef skillets his dad got in Ogunquit by the time both sides of his head felt like they were being torn in two. 

A leak, naturally. Sometimes happened when you were crying and heaving over the plughole and dousing yourself in toilet whitener. 

“S’why I called you. I thought I could die...chemical burns and stuff.” 

“Huh,” Eddie breathed, stumped. “And here I was thinking you’d just rented a new tape or something.” 

Richie watched his knuckles, which were starting to twitch, and managed something a little bit like a laugh. More just a whistle between the teeth, really. But it sounded warm. Sounded less vulnerable. “You can help though, right?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, I can help you.” 

The sun was still up, somehow. It was casting this weird, watery light on the bathroom that was pale green. And it was now that Richie noticed it because it was now that everything got ever so slightly hallucinatory. Colors got very strong. Eddie had moved out of his direct line of vision and this was apparently the only thing that had been keeping his grip on reality tight. When Richie eye-followed him over to where he was now leaning over the bath, his hockey uniform looked sort of feathery. Like a little peacock. 

GGGSSSHHHHHH. 

Eddie had twisted the bath tap on cold. He hit the shower-head switch with his elbow, as he hit most things, ‘cause it made him look sporty. Turned to Richie with that green light behind his head and said, “I can’t believe you’re glowing gold.”

Richie squinted. “Wuh?”

“I said I can’t _believe_ you’re going bald.” 

He leaned again to hitch Richie up under the armpits, steering him to the bath ledge. Apparently when facing each other this is a move that becomes incredibly awkward. Their knees fumbled and thudded on the tile like clumsy children. “I’m just gonna wash for now, okay?” Eddie said earnestly. “We can do something to the burns afterwards.”

“Okay.”

“Are you sad?”

“No.” 

Cold water pricked him in the nose where the smaller boy was checking the temperature, palm out flat in the stream. His sleeves were rolled up. The moles on his arms looked like tea stains. Soft. 

“Your mom ever wash your hair like this when you were a kid?” He asked, loud over the rush of the shower-head. “Your hair was fuckin’ huge, remember? Before she put it in that bowl cut.” 

Richie could think of at least five things he’d rather talk about than his atrocious prepubescent haircuts just then. He could think of twenty he’d rather do than sit like a dog while Eddie washed his hair and silently burned with thoughts of how _stupid_ he was. Alas. It was not exactly Richie’s night. “Yeah,” he said, defeated. “She used this..um..vegan shampoo stuff. Organic. It was basically just pinecones so my hair kept dirty all the time.” 

“God. She’s still into that stuff?” 

“Of course.” 

Eddie turned the shower-head towards Richie, satisfied with the cold. He gave him a little spritz on the nose to make it wrinkle. “I don’t get why you’d ever stay all hippie after having four kids. Four _boys_. If I had four boys mac ‘n’ cheese would just become my favorite meal forever. Like, it would just hit me.” 

“Already your favorite meal, dickwad,” Richie said, voice wavering as Eddie edged a thumb towards his sore ear. 

“‘Cause it’s all my mom serves me. Because my mom is actually somewhat smart.”

“Smart, strong, sexy…”

Something solid and metal dunked into the back of his head - Eddie had hit him. Weirdly woke him up, too. Like it had hit just the right part of skull over just the right anxious, bleach-soaked part of brain and now he was back to normal. Richie obviously was not back to normal. He couldn’t have coped with the hand now spidering through his hair so carefully if he was. But he felt bizarrely sort of alright. 

The hand all of a sudden felt terrifyingly tender. In a physical way, technically. It was touching bare skin up there. “Christ, Richie,” Eddie breathed, in a voice that touched bare skin too. “Your hair is really _dead_.” 

Richie looked down at his socks. “Well, I did kind of...It is kind of symbolic, after all.”

“Symbolic of what?”

“You know. A part of me on the inside dies so same goes for the outside.”

“You’ve died on the inside. Right.” Eddie’s tone was a little bumpy. A laugh in it somewhere. “How’s that?” 

The green light from the window was turning blue. Again, Richie tuned into it way too hard. It stung his eyes so bad the atmosphere sort of dipped for a second. Somehow, within this momentary strike of vertigo, words had fallen out of his mouth. Words such as: “I’m gay.” 

Oh. God. 

Richie took a breath. Like, a gasp at his own words. It fluffed out from between his teeth like when you cut open a teddy-bear and sat thick and starchy on the air. Eddie’s fingers were paused right over a sensitive spot. He let the water run cold a second while he processed this, in all its melodrama. Richie stared scrunch-eyed at his brother’s rubber duck like he was sat in front of a firework. 

“I know you did not just compare being _gay_ to being _dead_ ,” came quietly from behind him. 

“It’s...It’s how I see it though. It’s really depressing.”

Another pause. This felt like purgatory. “You know I am literally gay too right?” 

“Well, yeah, but.”

“Then you’re being an asshole!” 

Richie tried to twist his head backwards but only got a faceful of water and his skin stung like hell. He groaned into the ceramic. “Sorry,” he griped. “No, I am sorry. This all came out really wrong.” 

“You’re telling me. Keep your head still.”

He closed his eyes. “Do you forgive me?” 

“Do you want sea kelp or mineral clay?” Eddie cut over the top. He swiped both bottles up off the side so fiercely the tap knocked off a second. Richie sunk his teeth into his bottom lip like a scorned child. 

“Sea kelp,” he mumbled, watching Eddie whack his mineral clay shampoo down again like a hammer. “You could at least tell me you don’t hate me or something.” 

The sea kelp made a fart noise upon being opened, naturally. One that almost had them forgetting themselves and bursting into loopy giggles. One that also acted as another weird little fissure point. Eddie sighed, squeezing it out onto Richie’s scalp like ice cream. A crackling sigh. “Of course I don’t hate you,” he said wearily. “Why would I hate you for being gay?” 

Richie’s tongue wriggled around his mouth in time with Eddie’s rubbing, letting himself breathe. “I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone feel like that when they figure this stuff out?” 

“Not always.”

“Yeah, well...most right? I just. Um. It just feels different or weird or whatever. I feel different or weird.”

He could picture the face Eddie was making, back there, fixing up the shower-head. Eddie never took longer than approximately half a second to respond to things. Fast, loud and firmly-rooted. Just now he was gentle and pensive. “You’re not weird,” he said unsurely. “Not because of that at least.”

Eddie had stopped touching his hair. The water just poured flat and heavy and Richie felt sort of new. “In other ways, though?”

“Definitely. Yeah. But good ones.”

“That feels back-handed.” 

A second little thud on the back of his head. “Don’t push it,” Eddie scoffed. “It means I think you’re great. Now come on, lets get you dried off in bed.” 

Richie hadn’t really gotten wet. Eddie was so careful and clear-cut all the droplets seemed to curve off right below his ears. Nevertheless, they’d mummified him in towels, and standing in front of his bedroom mirror ten minutes later Richie thought maybe he knew why. His eyes flitted from the little postcard print of his parents pinned to it, to his hand on the coil of his hair towel, to the Eddie wearing pyjamas and drying off his hands at the door. “Don’t,” the latter said half-softly. “Leave it ‘til the morning.”

“I wanna see.”

“You’re too fragile right now.”

“Please never call me that again.”’

Richie darted back to the picture of his parents, feeling shy. Eddie had been dealing with his hair all night and still the thought of revealing it in front of him now made him sear. 

That was kind of the thing, with their friendship. Because Eddie was technically a really good friend to embarrass yourself in front of. He was to the point, he only asked questions that mattered. He gave you his time and his spare pair of pants. And the second Eddie looked Richie in the eyes while doing any of that, he turned into a stranger. It just happened. 

Eddie said, “ _don’t!_ ” again, as Richie dug his fingers into where he’d knotted the fabric up, but it was too late. Richie was staring at his nineteen year old mom in rollers as he tugged. A puke colored tuft came free. 

“It’s...We’ll fix it when it’s healed a bit,” Eddie was wittering fast. “You know, you just need to wash it a few times with some - some really good serum and drops and stuff. Just a few times and then we’ll make it brown again. And the bald spots will grow back healthier and...we’ll…” 

The boy in the mirror looked sick, when Richie chanced a glance at him. His curls had gone dry and stubby. A peanut-shaped patch of scalp gaped on the left. 

“Oh. Christ.”

“I told you not to look! Are you freaking out?” 

“No, it’s…” his nose prickled. 

“ _Richie_! You’re gonna _cry_!” 

Richie turned to look at him and, horrifyingly, a tear was falling down his cheek. This was not happening. Eddie was walking towards him and it had all gone filmy, comic-book animated because this was _not_ happening. “It’s gonna grow back to normal!” Came his cartoon speech bubble - slanted text. “It’s gonna be fine! You’re - I think it looks awesome!” 

They stood face to face with their tummies almost touching. This was their version of a hug, in a lot of ways. Just breathing together. 

“My face looks...so round?”

“No it doesn’t! It’s rock ‘n’ roll. You look like a rock ‘n’ roller.” 

“They’re gonna kill me,” Richie croaked, leaning forwards a little dangerously. “At school. They’re gonna kill me.”

Eddie took grip of his shoulders and something dirty and sad in his head noted this as a push back. He toughened his face; looked like a German Shepherd. “I will kill them first,” he said seriously. “I mean it. So you can just go to bed and not worry about this right now because I’m gonna handle it. Okay?”

“They won’t...”

“Yes they will. Everything’s okay. You can wear my jersey if you want.”

Bizarrely, this was an offer Richie was pretty pleased to take him up on. 

He slept with the tip of his nose against the wall. Eddie had one of those faces you just got a weird, awkward instinct to study a bit, you see. Like the first punky girl to ever bag your groceries as a kid. The sort you had to organise some grand super-spy scheme with your pocket mirror and cereal box periscope just to count all the piercings on. Eddie didn’t have any piercings. His face was unfreckled and his skin was clean and tan. For whatever reason, it would have kept Richie awake for days. 

“You’re a good liar,” Eddie said from over his shoulder, when they’d settled down. AKA, laid grinding their teeth in silence for fifteen minutes. The ceiling fan was on high and they were wearing each other’s clothes like kids. 

Richie’s heart stammered. “What?”

“Well, I mean, you’re good at lying. To your mom and John and Carl and stuff. Do you think you could keep one lie up for your whole life?” 

“Uh…” he turned his chin to the ceiling. His hair made a noise like sand pouring against his pillow. “Depends on the lie I guess. If it was something tiny, maybe.” 

“Could you pretend someone is dead?”

Richie finally looked round properly. Eddie laid facing him with Bugs Bunny bedspread pulled right up to his nose, even though it was August. His eyes were fizzing dark. “Are you, like, okay?” Richie asked, but before he’d even finished, those eyes had crinkled shut. Eddie was giggling like a fox. 

“Yeah! Yeah. I’m fine,” he snickered, bafflingly. “I’m just thinking about some stuff.” 

“Like what?” 

“It doesn’t matter that much. We should probably just sleep.” 

Richie gave him a frozen sort of look. One he hoped conveyed that this was an absolutely _horrendous_ note to fall asleep on. Eddie looked back at him, and conveyed a sticking to his guns in turn. It struck Richie for a second now that he really wished he looked like Eddie. Or at least held himself the same. 

He made to shift back to the wall but Eddie was pursing his lips. “One last thing,” he said, fan tousling his hair in his eyes. It was full of weird, waxy product and laid kind of thick on him like fudge. 

“If it’s not terrifying, go ahead.” 

Eddie snorted again. And then went thoughtfully quiet. “No, I don’t think it is. I was just wondering if you wanted to go to...if we’re still going to the comic convention together? On Saturday?”

Richie put a hand up over his own hair, which felt like nettles, and pulled a face. Trying to work out if he was currently just very exhausted or very overwhelmed or if Eddie was just being very confusing. His dad bought their comic convention tickets home at least six months ago, now. Stanley Uris had fashioned him the best Wolverine costume in all of the United States. They were set.

“Yeah. Obviously?” He said slowly. 

“Don’t do that voice.”

“But you’re freaking me out.” 

Eddie pulled the bedspread up higher. The little button of it lay between his eyes like a jewel. “I just mean because we’ve been - been weird recently.” His voice got so low and dark it seemed to blend in with the black of the bedroom for a second. “Because you kissed me. Before.”

Richie felt like his face was eating itself. He stared at the bottom of his windowsill, the part moonlight didn’t reach, and felt himself covered in teeth. “That was ages ago,” he unintentionally whispered.

“It was last month.”

“Oh. Well. I was having a weird night, wasn’t I.” 

Silence. As always. The only place their nights really, truly ever went. Skating round the edge of something real and important and ending up in silence. Eddie was staring at him, still, but Richie’s eyes stayed on the window. There was a moth crawling slow up the left length of it. Its wings fluttered as Eddie took a sleepy breath. 

“You wanna listen to some music?”

Richie didn’t turn. “I thought we were meant to be sleeping.” 

“To help us sleep, I mean.”

“It doesn’t do that for me.” 

A small clink sounded from his bedside table. Eddie had leaned over to retrieve Richie’s walkman and push it around in his fingers a bit, exploring. The orange headphone fabric ran soft against his pillow and a Vaselines cassette was poking out. “Well, each to their own, I guess,” he said gently, slipping the metal over his head. “Night, Baldo.” 

“Fuck off. Goodnight.” 

Richie watched the moth and tried to figure out what kind of state he was in. This whole night felt weirdly distant, already. Like looking at Eddie’s face forty seconds ago was something strange and painful resurfaced from childhood. He hadn’t meant to tell him what he told him in the bathroom and still felt like he hadn’t told him enough. That was Richie and Eddie, alright. Always on the tip of the iceberg. Sky and water always just as freezing cold. 

He could hear _Son of a Gun_ stitching softly into Eddie’s ears, behind him, as the moth flew away. Richie wondered if he was asleep. Hoped so, at least. What would have happened if they half-broke the headphones slipping them over both of their ears? If Richie was watching Eddie drift, just now, ears full of harmonica?

Somewhere around the chorus, around _sun shines in the bedroom_ , a hand touched over his back. Five fingers over jersey-covered skin, drawing the shape of a kitty cat.

_The raining always starts, when you go away._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my gosh......i cannot believe i am finally posting this. planning and starting this fic has been my actual lifeline for the last month, this is so freaking exciting!!!!!!! would just like to once again thank my best friends for inspiring so much of this story and helping me proofread. i also have made a playlist to fit the vibes/reflect a little of richie and eddie’s tastes during my monthlong losing-my-mind immersion in it so here is [that](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7BRZnMu1t9fP2bCDqMdKsY?si=cSFA7R40Tb-B7akEputkXw)
> 
> :D enjoy! i will update this as much as i can


	2. postcard

It was a hot, green August day, when they went to the comic convention. The kind of day that this kind of town would dedicate a page in the paper to. All the people of Derry were up at the crack of dawn just to sit out in the cool; metal deck-chairs in front yards, ice boxes on grass. The air con at the corner store had blown up in the strain of it all and if you cycled past you could see the cashiers out panting on the curb. Richie Tozier had woken up, that morning, from the sweat in his jammies alone. 

That, and the brisk mom tugging his sheets back from his chin. Maggie Tozier. Most definitely head of the crack of dawn crowd. She was wearing a summer dress with kittens on the skirt and hadn’t rubbed the sunscreen on her nose in properly. “Hey - hey, Richie,” she’d been prissing, voice blending with the cicadas. “Hey, it’s time to get up, Richie.” 

Richie blinked through what felt like thick, hot chocolate, and was really just morning air. His teddy-bear’s ear was in his mouth. “Wuh-uh…?”

“Time to get up, your friends’ll be here in ten.”

“What friends?” 

“Oh, I don’t know. The curly-haired, the farm fella. The one that tracks his dirty shoes through the house.”

He pushed himself up onto his elbows abruptly. His eyes were out of focus and the pillowcase was stuck to his neck. “Eddie,” Richie corrected, which had his mom nodding unsurely. “And Stan and Mike and stuff.”

Maggie nodded again. The room was becoming clear. It was now Richie noticed that alongside the soft, embroidered cats on her dress, there was also a small child clinging there too. His little brother, Davey. Tears on his cheeks and egg on his chin and all. Richie leaned to give him a poke between the eyes in greeting as Maggie went on, “sure, _and stuff_. Can you get in your little...um, your getup that fast?” 

“I think so. I’ll probably strip it down a bit for the heat.” 

She sniffed. “You’ll keep the hat, I hope.” 

It had been six days since the calamity that was Richie’s bleached hair. Five since Maggie herself had seen it. He’d tiptoed out early for school, on the Monday morning, riding in on the back of Eddie’s bike. Came home wearing a bobble hat from the fifth grade. Naturally, this just had to be the evening his mom picked up a _miracle-working_ dandruff powder after work. One _right up Richie’s alley_. She’d pounced at him with it in the kitchen doorway like a robber. It ended up being the first time in history Maggie Tozier ever cursed in front of her kids. 

“I’ll keep the hat,” Richie said, with a half smile. “Love you.” 

Maggie let off a breath she’d apparently been holding in. She puffed it out in an affectionate little sigh and touched Richie’s cheek, before moving to hold at Davey. Hitched him up under the armpits a bit. “And David too?” 

“Yes Mom. I love both you and David.” 

“You hear that, Tiny? Richie loves you.” Davey, who from the looks of his face had been having a rough morning, softened considerably. He stood in his Mom’s grip like a puppet and gave Richie a grateful poke of the tongue. Maggie did a confused little chuckle. “Well, very good then. I’ll leave you to it.” 

No amount of stripping down on this costume was going to make it cool. This was something Richie picked up rather quickly. He’d done a test-run of just his hat and his underwear alone and ended up doubled over on his bed with a soft little, “ _woah_.” All he could really go for here was a purple pocket-fan and some minimal dignity, and by the time he’d got that down the doorbell was ringing. “You’re not wearing gloves?!” said Stanley Uris, or Nightcrawler, on the other end of it. “How’s anyone gonna tell you’re Wolverine?” 

Richie had just puffed out his chin. “I’m too hard for ‘em.”

“Hard in which sense?” 

“One you just wouldn’t understand, Stan.” 

(They’d stopped for ten minutes so Richie could run back and get his gloves, and so Stanley could preen the claws on them to perfection. It was really annoying.) 

The convention itself was exactly as disappointing as they were all praying it wouldn’t be. With a grand turn out of forty attendees, it was your classic sort of Derry-pretends-it’s-important deal. The parish hall was decorated with the same craft store bunting Mike Hanlon’s grandpa covered their barn in for his fourteenth birthday. There was ‘epic music’, which was really gospel music from the church nextdoor, on a portable boombox and the biggest celebrity present was some balding comic store owner from Bucksport. 

Richie’s friends spent the majority of it sat by the fan, in the corner. Of course, out of the forty other attendees, there just _had_ to be another X Men group amongst them - one that did not strip down their costumes. This made even just walking and posing around the foyer seem pointless. Mike bought them all hot dogs to pass the time. Richie noticed Eddie didn’t touch his. He also noticed him drop it in the trash, on the way out, after they’d stomached a total two and a half hours. 

“I swear to fuck, how hard is it to just...just make it _decent_?!” Stan was hissing, gripping their orange bandana in rage. They were all out in the open air again. Walking down the dirt road of some of the only non-tree-infested fields in Derry and panting like puppies. “Costume contest, _nice_ food, actual comics for sale…”

Mike was stretching his shoulders in the sun. “Think next year we should just go to Portland. Like, just bite the bullet.” 

“Eddie’s not allowed on coaches, Mikey.” 

“That’s why I said bite the bullet. I think I should just try driving us.” 

“Or I could take you all, in my Dad’s car,” Richie chipped in, twirling a pulled-loose glove. He was acutely aware of the fact Eddie was silent and squinting at his side, just now, and it was making his voice come out froggy. “It’s less about who has the license and more about who’s got the Va-Va-Voom, you know?” 

Stan blinked. “No, I don’t. I actually have no idea what that means.”

“Sure you do! Who has the ego. Who’ll be able to charm us straight to the Double Tree if cops pull us over for speeding or something.” 

“Right, yeah. Or maybe whoever doesn’t speed in the first place.” 

Mike was now shyly trying to convince Stan over Richie’s shoulder that somehow Richie had some sense, but the latter was starting to let himself tune out. Eddie steadily kicked a stone like a soccer ball in the corner of his eye. He’d pulled his blue Cyclops cap off to try and cool down and it had turned his hair all frizzy and scruffy, which somehow made this sight much sadder. Looked like he’d been rained on. 

Richie leaned a little awkwardly to his right. “You good?” came his grand, poetic comfort. 

Eddie looked up. Thank god. He was still squinting but it might have been ‘cause of the sun. Richie squinted back for different reasons.

“Yeah, why?” Asked the smaller boy. 

“Seem a bit...hot and bothered.” 

“It’s the hottest day of the year.” 

“Well, ob-vee, but -” 

The sound of a car engine revving skimmed through Richie’s voice like a rock. Everybody jumped; Mike dropped his still-going hotdog and was too slow in the heat to pick it up. Eddie’s attention was once again lost. He was making to put his cap back on instinctually as an ugly, rasping truck appeared rolling up behind them, bizarrely. Derry never saw much traffic at all and tracky little back-routes like this were a ghost town. 

The groan of a window being rolled sounded. “Hey! HEY L- _OOOOOO_ -SERS!” 

Oh. Joy. 

The four stopped and bristled on the grass as a teenage boy came level with them, hanging his scarred arms out of the truck. A boy with a buzzcut and a deceivingly kind face. His window was only half open and a bird had taken a righteous shit right down the middle of it; Richie could hear some music his dad liked rumbling. It smelled like diner food and metal. 

“Hey _losers_ ,” the boy said again, not having to strain his voice this time. Todd Silvetti. Derry High School dropout who never learned to let go. “You doing a play pretend?” 

Stan, Mike, Eddie and Richie all stayed silent. Another face was peeking around Todd’s shoulder - a girl’s face. The backseat was crammed with more high school boys and it must have been like a furnace. 

“We just got back from a convention,” Mike said, after a beat. “We actually had plans for this weekend, so.” 

The girl giggled. Todd just sort of clucked his tongue. “What the Hell’s a convention?” 

“It’s....Well, it’s self-explanatory. It’s a place for people to convene. The topic was comic-books so basically everyone just dressed up and celebrated things to do with comic-books. Our costumes are a celebration of -”

“Now hold on a minute,” Todd cut in like a fish gutter. Not a single muscle in his face was concentrated throughout Mike’s shy little explanation. Well, not on Mike at least. He’d produced a clean popsicle stick from his foul-smelling truck and slid it between his teeth like a cigar. Eyes locking firmer and firmer on: “Huggies? Is that _you_ back there, Huggies?” 

Richie, at the back of the group, looked away.

A conclusive whoop came from the backseat. Brian Lovejoy or Kenny McKinley or one of Todd’s other fucking idiots. Todd had a look on his face like happy thunder and leaned himself even further out of the window. So far he could touch them all if he stretched. “Oh my God,” he marvelled from gritted teeth. “It _is_ Huggies under all that. How’d you ever fit your diaper in that crazy costume?”

The sheer gale of laughter this produced sounded studio recorded. Eddie, for the first time since school on Friday, spoke up in a clear voice: “you do know his name is actually Richie, right? Like, your brain isn’t genuinely rotted that hard?” 

Todd gaped as though Eddie had said something completely different. This was the thing about him, that made him uncrackable. Too stupid to be cracked somehow. Like he couldn’t understand your defence enough to ever be truly wounded by it. “You’re telling me he’s not wearing a diaper?” He went on, flapping his lips obnoxiously. “Please someone say he is. I’m freakin’ out, you fellas. I think he’s about to leak.” 

Richie’s knees were bending a bit as more laughter came. “Jeez, Silvetti,” he said at last, still looking out over the field. A squirrel was chittering somewhere. “It’s been four years. When are you gonna stop thinking about what’s under my pants?!” 

“I’ve got a right to be worried about it, Huggies. It’s tough love is all. Somebody’s got to potty train you.”

“I’m literally seventeen.” 

“Exactly. That’s what makes you so fucking gross.” 

Eddie whipped his cap off for the second time today and this time his hair stood up like a spike. It made a smacking noise as he swung it. Kenny-or-Brian hissed a little like a spark had flown. “I think it is _considerably_ more gross chasing Richie up in some...some remote field with your car just to talk about his pee,” he rattled off. This display of emotion was completely alien from anything else Eddie had done all day. “I think if I were an outsider hearing about this, say at school, I would think you were an obsessive maniac.” 

Todd paused, starting to squint. The smirk was still on his face as thick as mud but his eyes looked confused. “Then I would tell that outsider that he asks for it. He always asks for it, with that big, fat mouth.”

“You wouldn’t tell them anything, Todd. You don’t go to our school. Everyone already talks about what a crazy fuck you are since you left.”

The rest of the car was sort of suspended just now. Waiting for a green light on whether to jeer or look at the floor or pile out of the doors and start throwing punches. Such a green light never came, though. Todd was just staring at Eddie like he was some sort of funny cloud in the sky. And then he was staring at Richie. It was the most bizarrely even mix of embarrassment, confusion and annoyance you’d have ever seen. So even it was jarring. 

The engine restarted. In this moment and this dizzy, scary heat, it almost sounded like angels singing. “Next time,” Todd said, looking to the front but somehow so obviously speaking to Richie. “I’ll get you by yourself.” 

“Romantic,” Richie said quietly. Gratefully, quiet enough for the engine to pretty much overpower. Todd and his cronies were gone in a cartoon flash of dust. 

The four losers were left staring at the sun with their chests heaving. Eddie had his hands over his own throat and his eyes were closed. He looked like he’d fallen asleep on the spot. Then, a slither of voice came from him. So mousy and quiet it could have been the wind, but oddly strong, always strong:

“You guys wanna go swimming?”

-

Richie’s skin was so hot it stung when cool water touched it. Even if Derry’s community ‘splash centre’ wasn’t the coolest, for it was so cheaply built and so densely crammed, it made him wince. By three o’clock in the afternoon he was stood at the deep end in his Pink Panther trunks and the mess of his own arms around his stomach. Wincing. 

He liked to swim, really. It made him feel sporty. Richie’s dad used to put him in the sea at York beach when he was little and every wave he stayed up on earned him a piece of taffy. Much more successful than catch or backyard swingball. Alas, seventeen year old Richie currently had an Eddie Kaspbrak underwater, right before him, who was playing noughts and crosses on his left knee. A string of bubbles from Eddie’s voice down there was running the length of his tummy. So, you know. A bit different. 

“You got such big knees!” Was what the bubbles had been trying to express. Eddie emerged from the ripples and reminded Richie of books Maggie read him as a kid. Creatures of the lagoon or something. 

“Um. Thanks?”

“You’re welcome,” Eddie panted. Richie hugged himself tighter. “You can tell you’ve got, like, really strong bones. Sturdy.” 

A beach ball from some nearby kids came floating up by his shoulder. Watching it drew Richie’s attention to the fact Mike and Stanley, just behind, were doing some odd sort of two-man chicken fight. It looked weird. “Gee,” he said, staring for a second. “It’s almost like you’re complimenting me.” 

“You don’t want me to compliment you?”

“I’m just saying it’s out of character.” 

Eddie’s expression wavered. There was water pooling into his mouth from where he stayed crouched low and sweat in three, neat plots on his forehead. “Oh, right,” he said, in a tone only Maggie Tozier herself could come level with. “I’m just horrible then, I forgot. That’s why I fixed your hair and yelled at Todd for you.” 

He swished a little on the spot and his elbow grazed Richie’s, in a twisty kind of way. Processing this and Eddie’s anger all at once might have made Richie’s heart eat itself. “Stop prissing. We just like to tease or something.”

Luckily, and strangely, Eddie actually did stop prissing. He just paused mid-turn with his eyes on the tile between his toes. 

“I’ll fix your hair again if you want.” 

“No, it’s all good. I didn’t mean to make you think you were horrible.”

“It still needs fixing,” Eddie said. Then he turned into a comic-book character again, for a moment. The air around him went filmy and bright again. ‘Cause he’d just reached his hand out of the water like an arcade claw and, insanely, put it in Richie’s hair. He held it right over the parting. The touch felt almost cradling. “I can dye it back dark,” came his blue-ink voice. “One more deep condition and then I’ll do it.” 

Richie all of a sudden couldn’t really speak. Like, genuinely. An “oh,” was all he could manage. 

The hand fell away and time came off pause. Eddie had gone back to crouching like a drinking dog, watching Richie in a way that was probably friendly but for some reason made his forehead trickle. “Can I show you something else too?”

“Like a different hair color? My mom’s kind of…”

“No. Not about the hair,” Eddie said briskly. There was a blown out leaf stuck to his shoulder. “I mean, can I show you something right now?”

Richie looked around the pool. Trying to figure out where in the name of God Eddie could pull anything exciting from just now. Some wild, wobbly part of his brain thought of couples in movies for a second. Like when the girl went _‘can I tell ya something?’_ and had the boy lean in close and then after a beat she’d kiss him. Richie barely had enough time to be horrified with himself over this as, just as he’d blinked the thought out of his head again, Eddie was halfway across the water. This felt symbolic.

By the time he’d finished doggy paddling along after him Eddie’s arms were already stretched over the poolside, elbow-deep in his own backpack. It was a sporty one with a grizzly bear on the front compartment. He pulled a scrap of card out of it. 

“I...um...This morning,” Eddie said, voice blunt over the lapping water. “I was getting clean clothes this morning, from the airing cupboard. I saw this.” 

He dried his knuckles over the grizzly bear’s face then held it up. Richie squinted. “I haven’t got my specs on,” he said awkwardly. 

Eddie’s shoulders dropped in impatience. “Are you kidding?”

“I can see it if I hold it up close.”

“Your fingers are all wet.” 

“It’s fucking card!” 

With an annoyed-but-not-really sigh, Eddie passed it over into Richie’s shook dry hands. The card felt old and powdery. It was small, the size of an envelope, and had a picture of horses running in a derby on the front. He flipped it over to find writing. Smudged, green writing. 

_To: Eddie_

_Happy birthday. I bet you are getting big. I miss your smile and your awesome sense of humor. Hope to see you soon._

_Pop._

Richie read it three times exactly. Then he blinked up at Eddie again, who had an anxious thumb in his mouth. Waiting on Richie’s verdict like this was a college letter or something. “Who’s Pop?” Richie asked after a beat. 

Eddie blinked back. “Dad,” he said. “He means Dad.” 

“But your dad’s not…”

“Alive? Yeah. That’s what I thought too.” Eddie took the paper back from Richie’s hands, which stayed suspended in the confusion of it all. He switched it back to the picture of the horse and dangled it in the taller boy’s eyes. Scratching over the bottom corner fine-print - _11/21/78_. “But this was sent on my _sixth_ birthday. And he’s meant to have kicked the bucket before I was even born at all.” 

Richie couldn’t really work out Eddie’s facial expression, just now. The water stuck to his face made his eyebrows sparse and dark and his eyelashes spiked. Bristling, that was sort of the only way to describe it. Like his skin might have hissed if you touched it. He looked happy and proud and miserable and furious and it made the tips of Richie’s fingers sting. “So he’s still…” Eddie’s energy seemed to snake-coil as Richie spoke. “So he’s still out there? Possibly?”

Eddie didn’t reply for a good ten seconds. He just smiled. 

Then, he was off under the water again, like a streak of ink.


	3. momma

_It was in the bottom of a wardrobe. That’s where Richie kissed Eddie. That’s where Eddie pulled away, Maggie Tozier’s Sunday dress hanging in his eyes. “Please,” he’d whispered in the dark. “Please stop making me sad.”_

-

Eddie lay on his side in the grass of his front lawn, as though it were the sands of California. A hand was propping him up all carded through his slowly drying hair and he looked real calm. Richie watched with his teeth on edge. 

“I’m pretty sure every state does cards like this,” Eddie said thoughtfully. He held the postcard high above the grass and it blotted out the sun for a second. “If the card’s even from his state. My mom says he travelled all the time.” 

“Your mom said a lot of things, though.”

“Why would you lie about travelling?”

“Why would you lie about being a widow?!” 

It was nighttime. The sky had gone this weird, ugly purple and green color, skewed by the heatwave. All the junebugs and moths were making their way out of the trees now, which meant all the human beings were sitting inside, and that Eddie’s block was incredibly quiet. It was kind of the only reason they were able to lay here. To talk like this here. Had it been a clear, cool night, Sonia Kaspbrak would have been knitting on the porch and mumbling the whole book of revelations under her breath. 

She was frightened of Richie since she met him. Like, genuinely. And that was when he was a sixth grader with a tendency to brutally wet himself under pressure, so. God knows what she thought five years on. Richie caught sight of her fluffing at the kitchen curtains just now. 

“Can you be a bit more sensitive about this please?” Eddie was clucking next to him. He laid the card down on his stomach and let himself sink down properly, like a snow angel. “Like, this is genuinely game-changing for me. I think it’s gonna change my whole game.”

Richie folded his hands in his lap and squinted at them. “Sorry. Your manner is just really…”

“Not another criticism.”

“No, I mean. I can’t understand what mood you’re in so I don’t really know what mood to be in either.” 

Eddie rolled halfway onto his side. Or his shoulders, at least, just to look up at Richie like a puppy. His expression was sort of momentarily soft. Like someone had massaged his temples and let his eyebrows come hanging loose and all of a sudden he was an open book. “Well I’m sorry for being confusing,” he said. “Genuinely. And I’m glad you’re there for me or whatever.” 

An owl started singing somewhere. Richie was still looking at his sunburned legs. He seemed to spend his whole life aching and hungering for Eddie to be affectionate with him but then turning into a wallflower every time he was. “Forgive you,” he mumbled, embarrassingly. “I don’t mind helping. It’s nothing.”

“It’s pretty heavy stuff.”

“You’re good to tell me. A problem shared is a problem doubled after all.”

A snort from down in the buttercups. “I think the saying goes ‘halved’.” 

Richie finally raised his head, jumping a little bit to find a woman now sitting out in the front yard opposite. She was wearing a garden dress and had taken her whole phone set out on the porch. “Mom called her, probably,” Eddie deadpanned without even looking up. When Richie went to glance back at him his next discovery was that Eddie’s dark black _X-Ray Spex_ t shirt had rolled up slightly above his belly button. There was a freckle right on the darkest dot of it. 

Sometimes when Richie noticed these details about Eddie, it felt like he was just remembering noticing them, a long time ago. Like he was missing him all the time despite being with him.

“Called her for what?!” He said, finding his voice in the heat.

“To check up on us I guess.” 

Richie scoffed in disbelief but Eddie stayed totally silent. He wasn’t kidding. The woman across the road gripped onto the letterbox-red mouthpiece a little tighter and looked away, curling into herself, which seemed to confirm everything. Being watched was not exactly something alien to them, in a town practically the size of a quarter. Sometimes two boys on the same bike or quarreling on the same street corner just somehow rubbed people the wrong way. 

(“You know, Mr. Lovejoy said you were dressed very strangely in town today. Said you had this shirt with a horrible face on it.”

“It’s Eddie’s shirt, Dad. It rained.”

“Yeah. Yes. Well.”) 

But still, something about this felt particularly hateful to Richie. Or maybe he was just particularly irritable. A hot night could do that to you. “The hell does she think we’re even gonna do?” He grumbled. “If someone got hurt she’s literally right there.” 

Eddie shrugged. “Dig through all our family secrets and work out my dad’s still alive and well. Via horse-themed postcard.” 

“I meant realistically.” 

“I don’t know. Kiss or something.” 

Richie whipped to give Eddie a horrified little look. One that grew several fractions more horrified in real time to find Eddie not even laughing. His forehead stung like a mosquito had bitten it, sweating, and they looked at each other directly for a moment. For what was probably one of the only times in their whole best-friend-forever history thus far. Eddie broke it, though; he snorted and looked back up at the moon with his hair in his eyes.

“But for real,” he said mistily. “She does this whether I’m with you or not. Ever since I got into hockey she’s got -” a little dip of the shoulder towards the woman. “- Ruthie here on my case. Happens every time I come here to work out and stuff.”

“That’s fucked up. Some old woman just watching you - um - stretch.” 

“Yeah. Even weirder that I knew Ruthie literally forever too. She held me as a baby...came to all our nativities...stayed the night and watched over me when...whenever my Mom…”

Eddie spaced out. 

Richie gave him a second, but the second only became two. His mouth was hanging a little and he’d either just remembered something terrible or something very interesting. The rough curve of his cheek reminded Richie of cornfields, as he leaned to shyly poke it, or some other gold and earthy thing. “What are you thinking about?” He strained. 

The finger, astronomically, had Eddie look over at him. Eddie was by no means a malleable person but just now he’d tuned to Richie’s warmth like a Victorian puppet. “My mom,” he said clearly. “She used to go to watch horse races. She really loved those.”

“Oh, wow. That’s cool.” 

“Richie. _Horse races_.”

Eddie seemed to wrestle with the air for a moment. He whipped his hands from his left to his right until finding what he was looking for, just over his own hip. Swiped up the all-earth-shaking postcard and held it in Richie’s face another time. “Horse races!” He repeated wildly. “Stupid, pointless horse races in _Louisville Ken-fuck-y_.”

It hit Richie in the face like a knifed balloon. “Holy…”

“Shit. Holy shit,” Eddie finished in a teetering voice. “She must have been going to...to check up on him. Or fight with him. Or...I mean she definitely must have been seeing him, right?”

“Definitely. He must have seen pictures of you.”

“Up to when I was ten.”

Richie caught another little fluff of the curtains from the corner of his eye and the contrast between this and the fireworks display in Eddie’s face was so great it hurt. He was clutching his card like a kid. Pupils darting over every sepia-tone pony, whispering, “Kentucky, Kentucky, Kentucky,” under his breath like a wish. Richie wanted to cup his face or something. 

He folded his hands and grinned instead. “Can’t believe your dad’s a _southerner_.”

“I know. This is going to be so batshit.”

“Such a long way away…”

“Right? I bet a Greyhound’ll do it.” 

A little pause in the atmosphere. Richie squeezed at his own thumbs. “What, you’re gonna…?” He started, gaining Eddie’s cat-like attention again. The smaller boy looked somewhere between crying and laughing.

That was one of the things about Derry. Or Derry’s teenagers, at least. You went into Bangor and Augusta and maybe even Portland if your mom and dad came with you. You went on an airplane vacation if you were the town celebrity, and you showed everyone your Polaroid prints of it at the salon when you were home. Florida, Cuba, Mexico; the three corners of the world. Kentucky on some long lost father mystery tour age seventeen and license-free was not one of those corners. It was more of a hole, really. A pit in some of that grand, loose Derry earth that you twisted your ankle on while ‘falling astray’. 

The idea of Eddie doing that, of him falling astray, was frightening. 

“I’m gonna,” Eddie said quietly. “The whole point is that I need to know stuff. That I can’t know just from postcards alone. Whether he’s better to be with than my mom and if he’s actually a good guy and if he...maybe even loves me, you know? It’s too big. I’ll just do it in secret.” 

“What about the coach rule?”

“Fuck that.”

“You don’t have a driving license.”

“I’ll figure it out, Baldo. You sound like your mom.” 

Richie shook his head, giggling down at himself. The streetlamp made this all look like a nightclub and a long, smooth shadow was growing dark under Eddie’s nose. Richie felt vaguely like he was drunk.

Maybe that’s what inspired it. Maybe it was that specific dizzy looseness in his tongue, that let it press against his teeth in just the right way to say, “I’m not trying to be a mom. I’m trying to come with you.” Maybe that was why falling astray, with Eddie, suddenly played in his head like a fantasy. 

Something in Eddie’s face said he’d expected this response. The shadow on his lip shifted.

“You’ll take it seriously?” He asked, sounding vulnerable. Richie nodded and tried to keep his cheeks from going too hot. “This is the most serious it’s ever gonna get for me. I mean it.”

“Swear on my little brother.”

“You hate your little brother.”

“Yeah, but. If he died I’d probably get framed for the murder. So the same kind of goes.”

Eddie did that fox laughter again, tipping his chin up this time. A laugh so bright and distinct it got Ruthie glancing up from her gossip magazine like a bird. It was sort of a funny way to react for a boy with a tone so grave barely five seconds ago, but, nevertheless, a nice one. Richie watched all the wrinkles on his face dip and warp with the force of his giggles and felt a momentary sense of wholeness. Wholer than ever, by the time Eddie calmed a little, and breathed out,

“Alright, Richie. You and me for a bit.” 

Then he dropped back into the grass and started counting clouds. 

-

“Mom, can you listen to me please?!” 

The Toziers’ dining room was the biggest room in the house and it was still never enough, never at dinner time. Maggie liked to cook in huge, buffet size bulks so the boys wouldn’t argue and Davey liked to scrape his portions out of all her trays with his bare hands. That was this evening’s distraction. Richie was staring at the ceiling and praying for patience while Maggie karate chopped his little brother’s wrists. He’d been trying to speak for a solid fifteen minutes. 

“David! En- _ough_ with the monkey hands!” His Mom was wittering. She gave Wentworth a pained little ‘you could help, ya know’ look and hitched the tray up above Davey’s head. “Did you even wash up? After your nosebleed?”

Davey swiped for his vegan quiche expertly. “Yes Momma! Daddy helped.”

“Oh, is that right? I think Daddy must have been tired out or something because your fingernails are really quite caked.”

“Maggie. He’s a growing boy,” was Went’s timid contribution, over from where he was fixing up the tripod fan. He flipped it to the top setting and it blasted so hard it left a red patch on Richie’s cheek.

“Growing boys need to eat nicely.”

“I think they just need to eat full stop.”

“I think that you should -”

Carl Tozier, on the opposite side of the table, banged his fists against its oaky surface. He’d just turned thirteen two weeks ago and ever since doing so had grown very cocky. “Mom,” he whined. “Richie has been saying the exact same thing this whole time. Please can you make him stop?”

Maggie looked to her other two sons, tray tipping a little bit in her hands. Just at the right angle for Davey to get a chickpea fistful. “What? What are you saying, honey?”

Richie groaned and dumped his head down on the wood. “I’ve been saying it since I got home!”

“Yes, well. Being busy is what got that food on your plate. I’m all ears now.”

Richie peeked up through his hair to find his whole family staring at him. They all sort of had the same face. Or at least definitely the same starting point of it. Richie just looked like his grandpa who had racked up four separate drunk & disorderly charges over his life and none of his siblings. He couldn’t tell whether that made him proud or embarrassed, yet. “I just wanted to talk more about the Eddie stuff,” he said. “About Eddie’s dad.”

Another little thud came from Carl’s region. He was doing something sly under the table and rolling his eyes. “Mind-blowing.”

“What the hell do you know about Eddie’s dad, Carl?”

“Nothing, but I know everything else. I practically know what color his tighties are at this point.” 

Richie hitched his glasses up with his whole hand flat and wide as a starfish. “Oh, what, just ‘cause your friends are the most boring and un-discuss-able people on earth.”

“Just ‘cause I don’t keep pictures of them under my pillow at night!” 

He kicked over at Carl’s legs hard and was kicked back. Richie’s seat scraped noisily with the effort of trying to fight his little brother around a slab of ancient heirloom wood. Maggie set her knife and fork down harshly. Her hair was falling out of her ponytail with the frenzy of it all. “Boys! You’re _letting_ me _down_!” came her stock phrase. “It’s completely normal to keep pictures of your friends, Carl.”

“He was making that up!” Richie squeaked. 

“Well it still stands,” Maggie said unsurely. She was smoothing down her skirt over her chair which meant she was ready to be ‘proper’. Ready for a proper family dinnertime. “Richie can talk about Eddie as much as he wants. Right, Went?”

Went had a fork hanging out of his mouth. His teeth clunked against it, surprised and uncomfortable, but this was his one last chance where Maggie was concerned. “Right - right. Of course. Having your first true best friend is a very important part of growing up, becoming a man. Sort of every boy’s halfway point before they get a girlfriend.”

Richie whined like a dog. “ _Dad_!” 

“You cringe, Richard, but it’s true. Friendships your age can be very intense and shape your whole...well, your life, really. Serious stuff.”

Maggie was giving a sympathetic little nod as if Richie had just asked for a marriage blessing. He clamped his hands over his temples and wondered vaguely if the world really was all made just to trick him. 

“I literally - _literally_ ,” Richie emphasised angrily. “Just wanted to tell you more about that postcard, Mom. The one Mrs. Kaspbrak hid from him.” 

Richie had sat on the kitchen countertop, when he got home earlier, and managed to tell his mom at least the first quarter of this story. The pool, the ponies, the fluttering curtains. Only then the cat puked. And Carl came home with a graze on his knee. And steam came out of the oven and Davey started crying and since then it’d been a total tycoon. 

Telling his mom every secret he learned was one of Richie’s weirder habits, because this always happened. She was always distracted and her advice was always off-kilter. Alas, Richie just didn’t like to keep things up in his own head. They just didn’t feel safe there. 

“Of course, of course,” Maggie said, sipping at her funny dandelion drink. Her tone was still not truly engaged but Richie couldn’t be grumpy about it anymore. She couldn’t really help it. “It’s all very interesting and scary, huh? Like something off Columbo.”

“Totally. The craziest thing about it is...I think Eddie’s actually gonna go see him.”

“He lives in Maine?”

Richie held his breath. “No, Kentucky.” 

Silence - save for Davey’s scoffing. Maggie paused with a ring of drink around her lip and Went was squinting down at him like he didn’t have his glasses on. “That’s not…” mumbled the latter. “That doesn’t seem right. How’s a boy like Eddie getting all the way down there?”

Richie felt like snapping over ‘a boy like Eddie’ but it didn’t quite strike him the right way for it. He didn’t fully see that sentence from his dad’s point of view. Which probably looked something like Eddie all weak and whimpering and locked away in his bedroom by Sonia Kaspbrak’s key. No, Richie’s point of view was much brighter. Boys like Eddie belonged either in the heart of the city or the heart of the forest and wore bright orange headphones, listening to the Vaselines. Boys like Eddie could talk to stray cats and teach Richie how to do the MC Hammer dance in his bedroom after winter formal. They were good, truly, genuinely good. The put down had ended up making Richie blush. 

He forked a dry pickle into his mouth and raised his eyebrows. Up into his orange, dying hair. “With me, I guess,” he said bravely. “With me coming to help him.”


	4. coffee

_TELEPHONE DIRECTORY: Menifee County, KY.  
KASPBRAK Franklin 14 Court Chase……….Frenchburg._

-

Police cars were both scarce and scary, where Richie and Eddie lived. They were rickety and brown and the sirens sounded sort of wartime-y. Weren’t needed enough to be kept pretty. They’d crawl up once every two years for a kid stuck up a tree or ‘misunderstanding’ at the corner store like creatures from the bottom of a lake. Engines rasping, whole street watching. Police cars appeared on Richie’s block, the morning after the postcard, for their first appearance in a year and a half. 

Five in the morning. His bedroom was still blue and he hadn’t been sleeping well. He dreamed about Kentucky, but, like, if Kentucky was all desert. Just one wide, lonely desert, like an alien planet. When the clamor outside woke him he could still feel sand in his eyes. 

Richie padded out of his bed with his hands tugging at his Garfield shorts. His mom didn’t like anybody up when she wasn’t, and he wasn’t a particularly sneaky person. Had been cringing at his heel bumbling over the one loose floorboard in all the house by the time he saw Davey on the landing, touching his ears and crying, and forgot everything. 

“Davey?” He croaked in the quiet. A sniffle was all he got in response. “Davey. Dave. What are you doing on the…?”

Davey pressed his own face into the wallpaper. He always wore flannel pyjamas, no matter how hot and awful it got, and just now they were stained on the shins with sweat. Richie crept towards him a little awkwardly. “You had a bad dream or something?” He pushed on. 

The tiny, banana-stained hands on Davey’s face parted an inch, spurred on by the closeness. Like now he could be sure this was really his older brother. His lips made a rattle noise, and then he managed a, “there’s something on the la-a-awn,” that fluffed off into a sob. 

“Hey, it’s alright. You probably heard the sprinkler or something.”

“No. I saw it. Lights.”

Richie hovered in front of him, bones in his knees crackling. He had never been much of a comforting spirit and that apparently came from his mom. She was always the sort of good heart, blundering tongue sort of person he’d grown into. Alas. He was probably a _little bit_ better than his mom. He could make Eddie feel better, after all. Sometimes. And he could make Davey feel better; Richie leaned to take the boy under his arm like a teddy-bear, rolling his chin out. 

“What kind of lights?” He asked into his brother’s hair. 

“Bright ones with music. They’re all out on the lawn just now.”

“Davey, is this about Close Encounters again? You remember what Mom said? It’s not real, it’s all just special eff -”

ZZZZZZZZZZ!

A siren from outside. Richie whipped his head around with a look on his face like the sky had just torn up clean. Sure enough, through the gap of his own bedroom door, red and blue lights buzzed like the North Pole. 

“Cops,” he breathed, stunned.

A break-in and a burglary, that’s what all the fuss had been about. The sheriff’s whole, dusty cavalry was lined up outside Mrs. Norton’s house, right opposite the Toziers’, and the whole block were sat on their lawns. Old man Gene from around the bend was taking photos of it all on his shake-up camera. The atmosphere out there felt oddly similar to that of a drive in picture show. 

Richie stood at the curb with Davey hitched up against his stomach, watching Mrs. Norton cry on her mailbox in a little bit of a trance. They were the only kids on the scene. Weird. You’d think living somewhere all the time where stuff like this was rare as an asteroid crash it’d be hard to watch, but both brothers just kept on staring. Played out clean and cartoony in front of them like a really fucked up comic. 

Maggie was out on the porch, when Richie finally looked back around, and from the looks of things she had been for a while. She was sitting on the string chair in a nightgown with a blank look on her face. Had been wearing that in front of Richie ever since he’d dropped his K-bomb at dinner last night. She brought him black hair dye on the way home from work and had scrubbed it into him after eating in total silence. But just now, when she turned to him with it, the look shifted into something a lot worse. Something kind of sad. 

“Mrs. Norton’s TV is gone,” Richie said sheepishly, padding back up the steps through all the thick, summer morning fog. Maggie was picking at the loose stitch of her sleeve frostily. “And her dog.”

“Yes.”

“They think a bunch of teenagers did it. I could probably tell the cops ‘bout Todd and all them if it might give them some ideas.”

“No, you just let them do their thing.”

“Right, yeah, that’s what I…” He swayed from heel to heel, the floorboards already getting hot. “You okay, Ma?”

Maggie just looked up at him with her best, saddest face possible. It annoyed Richie, ‘cause it’s not like he had really done anything to intentionally upset her, and really she should be glad he told her at all. Most kids wouldn’t. That made Richie better than most kids.

She dropped her eyes again, the moment he came to this conclusion, and only said, “enjoy your trip,” in a tone the color of asphalt.

-

Richie needed money for a coach ride and Patty Blum from just outside of town owned a hairdressing parlour. Well, she didn’t own it. She was seventeen years old, always tucked in her sweaters and had been deemed ‘ditzy’ ever since she cried at their junior English class’s _Julius Caesar_ viewing. Patty’s mom could give you the smoothest beehive bump in all of Maine, though, and her whole family really was very nice. The sight of Patty herself on the back of Stan’s tandem bike that afternoon had come like a gift from the angels. 

“You’ll have to wear an apron,” she’d said candidly, dipping off the straw of her soda pop. She wore glasses a little like Richie’s and her skirt went down to her ankles. “It’s bright pink. With a lipstick print on it.”

Richie had a hand cupped over his brow from the sunlight and grinned a little in the shade of it. “Sure, yeah. That sounds kind of okay.”

“You’ll also have to be quick and with it. So not clumsy.”

“I’m not really clumsy.”

Patty raised her gingery eyebrows, looking to Stanley in front of her. They turned around and mirrored this look, and then like birdsong the two of them were giggling. “Sure, Rich. That’s why you’re banned from gospel reading in assembly,” Stan contributed. “That bible just flung itself into the -” Richie jolted his elbow back and Patty gave them a little flick on the ear before the two could sidewalk scrap like puppies. The bike shuddered towards the curb. 

“It’s fine, I’m clumsy too,” she cut through clearly, a snicker under her voice. “It’s no biggie. Just show up at 8 and all Mom’ll really want you to do is, like, serve coffee. Three dollars an hour. That’ll sort out your trip?” 

Richie dusted his own arm and nodded. His vision swam randomly. “Uh-huh. Yeah. That’ll do it.”

The hair salon was one of those places that was very little but felt very big. Or, like, felt it should be big. It was treated like something out of the Roman times in this town; a pink, sunny watering hole where all the women would come to gossip and gripe in the afternoons, to pretend they were going to a ball or a disco instead of the next-door Rite Aid afterwards.Richie was chronically out of place there. Awkward, pimple-faced sons were exactly what all the customers had showed up to escape from. He stood among them in his too-tight apron like a tombstone.

Nevertheless, Patty had been honest. It really was just serving coffee or sometimes passing her a towel. And it was interesting, spotting everyone from school’s ma. He watched Patty squeeze honey oat conditioner into Betty Ripsom from bio’s mom’s curls and wondered what it was like to not have your parents appalled by you. 

“It’s weird your mom won’t just lend it to you. Cash, I mean,” Patty was chattering with her sleeves rolled up. Apparently the beauty of the salon is what was said in there _always_ stayed in there. You could talk at the top of your lungs and it’d always come out a whisper, quiet beneath the blow dryer. “Always thought you were rolling in that.”

“She’s kind of in a strict phase right now.”

“Still, allowance? Didn’t you used to have five different lunch boxes?”

Richie scratched through his hair, snorting into his own collar. This felt somehow really embarrassing. “I think she’s just scared. That I’m not gonna come back or will get sucked into something weird or...I don’t even fucking know.”

Patty looked at him critically through her thick, dark orange bangs. She had sweat stains on her cardigan and they always razzed her badly for that at school but this apparently flew here, too. “I guess it is kind of scary. I never met anyone who made it as far as even Kittery all on their own.”

“It’s not on my own. I’m going with Eddie.” 

She paused with dark, greying hair knotted around her thumb, glancing down at the water. And then she sort of grimaced. “Oh,” Patty said. 

The hair on Richie’s back and arms quirked. It felt like his entire existence was getting this reaction, nowadays. Just one miserable ‘oh’; just one hushed, anxious plea to change the subject. “What?!”

“Nothing.”

“No, tell me!” He pushed on. Added a giggle to his tone for casualness. “Doesn’t going with a friend make it better?!”

Patty turned off the tap and shook her fingers dry. Mrs. Ripsom had her eyes closed, and Patty leaned over her like a meerkat to check this out fully. God. Amongst the rush of bubbles and splashes there was now a soft snoring sound. She clucked her tongue before looking at Richie seriously. A ‘you know what I mean’ seriously. “Yeah, Richie, that would make it better. If it was Stan or Ben or Mike. Me even. But not Eddie.”

“What’s that meant to mean?”

“‘Cause Eddie’s...he’s...um.”

“I didn’t take you for, like, a bigot or anything.”

“No - !” Patty threw her hands up animatedly, which she did in class a lot. She was kind of like a silent debater. Where she growled and gesticulated like someone who had a great deal of good points but could never actually get as far as articulating them. “No. That is _not_ what I think. Genuinely. I was just trying to see things from your mom’s point of view.” 

Richie draped himself backwards an inch so his butt hit the wall and his hair swept out of his face. His nose was pinched up in thought. “She’s always been fine ‘bout him. Too fine, to be honest. She says our friendship is ‘cute’. While we are both literally sitting right there.”

Patty snorted. She was now trying to towel-dry Mrs. Ripsom’s head in a way that wouldn’t wake her up. Looked like a painter at work. “Maybe it’s not about that, then. Maybe it’s ‘cause Eddie’s been kind of crazy recently.”

“You noticed that too?”

“God. It’s Derry, Richie. Everyone notices everything. Plus he storms out of class like it’s a damn Shakespeare play every other day,” she wittered. “In our math he sits totally by himself. Doesn’t talk to anyone. Maybe your mom thinks it’s gonna be a bad influence.” 

The bell on the door rang just behind their backs, which meant Richie now needed to pour some coffee at a hundred miles an hour, and not sit and work out what the fuck all of this meant. Oh, joy. The image of a tearful Eddie hunched over his equations alone and the short woman with a puppy under her arm blinking at him was pure whiplash. Richie tugged his shirt down and lunged for the machine with a headache.

“It’ll be nothing. I really think it’s nothing,” he was calling hastily to Patty over his shoulder. “I think she’s just bonkers, my mom.”

“Just worried about you, more like.”

Richie looked to the woman again to hand her the coffee cup. She had bizarre little wrinkles between her nose and lip and a familiar divot on the chin. A face too friendly to be friendly. By the time he’d put it in her cold, pink-painted fingers, and she’d said, “thank you,” in a vaguely southern accent, Richie had realised this was Todd Silvetti’s mom. The very same in a smaller, fluffier package.

He took half a stumble backwards. Oh. God. Whiplash was back. 

Patty was at his elbow again after a beat, waving Mrs. Silvetti to a seat down the other end of the floor, picking Mrs. Ripsom’s hair out of her nails. “Hi, missus, my mom’ll be over in a sec,” she said. “Go and rest your feet.”

It was a small and essentially protocol thing for Patty to have done, but, as she looked back up at him and Mrs. Silvetti impatiently stalked off, Richie still felt really grateful. Felt like he almost wanted to hug her. And he had never hugged a girl in his life. 

“She’s a real nasty one. Always complains,” she was saying. Avoiding the obvious. “I’ll have to fix her apron up, but...can I ask ya something first?”

“Totally.”

“Why _are_ you going to Kentucky with Eddie?”

Richie focused on his green and yellow shoelaces, down below, getting deja vu. “‘Cause his dad lives there. He found a weird postcard and turns out he’s secretly alive.”

“That’s _his_ reason. I meant why are you doing that with him?”

This was a dismayingly hard question. There were loose, blown-out curls flying around his feet as the door opened again and Richie kept on looking at them. Made it feel like a music video. He could almost hear a Madonna ballad in his head, as he played last night over again, in Eddie’s front yard. What was particularly worrying about this playback was that it kind of kept Richie’s answer the exact same. Eddie had been blinking down at his tiny printed ponies with so much ache in his face he could have been dying. He was talking about his dad maybe loving him as though that were a concept from outer space, out of reach. And the second he’d turned his attention back to Richie, Richie had just known. It was like a calling. 

It obviously wasn’t really a calling. Something much more basic than that. And that worried Richie. It made him feel like he wasn’t, like, a whole person, if whole people even existed. Like he might bury himself if Eddie was the one who lent him the spade. 

But, again. Even more basic, probably. Richie looked up again with an oddly refreshed look in his cheeks and Patty’s eyes were a little wide. “I don’t know,” was his great conclusion. “I think I just like spending time with him.”

This felt kind of like a solid answer all day, which was rare for Richie. Usually when he made discoveries about himself or tried to label said discoveries he could go about three hours before being completely annoyed and uncomfortable with himself again. Like in the bathtub, the other night. When telling Eddie he was gay seemed like the answer with a capital A and ended up giving him anxiety cramps in his sleep. Nevertheless. When Richie called Eddie after work things felt, for the first time in a long time, totally _simple_. 

“Fifteen dollars has got to be a bus, right?” He was wittering with a knuckle in his mouth. “I never caught one across states before, but, I mean. Fifteen dollars is a lot.”

Eddie’s voice through the speaker grew in Richie’s ear like a flower. It had dropped much earlier and much more confidently than Richie’s and when he whispered it sounded like a violet. “Not all the way from here to there but I think I got a plan,” came its bloom. 

“Don’t give yourself a headache.”

“Cram it. It’s genius. I say we hitchhike from here to as close as we can and then take a bus from wherever that is to - um - Dad’s town.” 

“Where’s his town?”

“Frenchburg,” Eddie said, before Richie even finished. There was a little crinkle of paper crackling on the line. He was flipping through a book. “I went to the library. There’s a phonebook for every Kentucky county and he’s in Frenchburg. Dumbass kept his fuckin’ surname.”

Richie puffed his lips out, impressed. “You have his address?”

“If he lives where he lived -” a little pause while he checked. “Three years ago, sure.”

“Then couldn’t you just send a letter first?”

“I could, but...it’s not what it’s about. Where’s the self-discovery in a letter?!”

For some reason this sort of offended Richie. One he couldn’t put his finger on, so one he couldn’t really let himself feel. He just stared at where the sky had gone deep through the window and sighed for a second. 

“Richie?” came that violet voice again. The phone was slipping down Richie’s neck. 

“Yeah?”

A pause, filled by breeze. “I’m really glad you’re coming with me.”

“Oh. It’s okay,” Richie said, tongue starting to buzz. “It’s always good to have a friend.”

“It’s good to have _you_.”

A hand was ghosting up to Richie’s chest, which was doing a kind of seesaw movement under his shirt. His own hand. It scrunched hard right in the middle and tugged on the fabric for dear life. “Yeah,” he whispered, that feeling of simple, blissfully simple, rushing back. “Yeah. It’s good to have you too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am SO sorry to anyone who is subscribed and just got a bunch of emails i had to repost this like four times cuz i kept messing up the format :’)


	5. dachshund

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cannot believe it took me a full twenty four hours to notice the format was off and publishing date was wrong....repost time  
> (tw for talk of death and mental health)

Eddie held his thumb out to the road as though he were petting some invisible donkey in it, face uncharacteristically gentle. The rain was starting to fall and it was the hot kind. His least favorite kind. He wore a sweater rolled up to his biceps with a scribble of ink over the left one. “Everyone here’s got such a big-ass car,” Eddie said. “It’s so stupid. ‘Cause town’s too small to drive anywhere on the daily and nobody goes far away. But they still need big cars.”

Richie and Eddie had travelled by foot as far out of Derry as possible, which was kind of just the very outskirts of it. It always seemed so small in the town centre and the school corridors and the dust but it wasn’t really. Not when you covered it all. Something about Derry being big made the world feel big, to Richie, as they walked. Like this mean old town only _wanted_ him not to previously think so. They were now stood at the end crossroads of it. Where you can take a left into the forest or a right out onto the open road, which were both equally dangerous, to people like Maggie Tozier. Both equally astray. 

The genius hitchhiking plan hadn’t really given them much luck. They’d been taking shifts ‘til their arms got cramp and bickering for just under an hour. And now it was starting to rain. “Wouldn’t you like a big car, if you could afford one?” Richie was saying from down on the grass. Still crouching and panting from the walk all this time after it. 

“Not if I didn’t need it. I’d use the money on a flat screen instead.”

“Nobody’ll see a flat screen though.”

“Exactly. They’ll just hear word on the street and cry ‘cause I won’t let them over for movie night.”

Richie snickered. There was a ladybug or some similarly spotted thing crawling up his sneaker. He watched it so close his glasses almost slipped and crushed it. “Would I be allowed for movie night?” He teased, voice dropping a weird little note. Making him sound coy.

Eddie didn’t razz him for it. There was a soft sifting noise from where he lowered his fluffy arm and looked down at him from up there. “Obviously. You’ve got to bring the tapes.” 

“You hate every movie I pick.”

“But not every movie you own. So you’ll just have to get wise.”

“Put your arm up, car’s coming.” 

His fingers flew up again like spilt milkshake, quiet rumble filling both boys’ ears. They’d seen so bizarrely little cars for a main road that each one’s engine was starting to sound like a thunderstorm. “Hey, look -” Eddie squeaked. He waved his thumb frantically. “Virginia license plate.” 

Richie peered over the tops of his knees at the truck Eddie was fixed on. Sure enough, the peeling, blue paint of Virginia was speeding towards them through that rumble, tacked onto the front of a pickup truck. From here you could just make out the face of a dachshund in the window. The driver’s was rolled down and a thin gush of smoke came out of it. Richie was a little uneasy about this whole ride setup. It _would_ get them out of Maine, and was somewhat their only option, but was still sort of touching a sore spot for him. He’d always avoided the road since Silvetti & co started with their schtick; had always been scared of it.

 _Hey Huggies, come on in, I’ll drop you home. Hop in the backseat Huggies. Don’t you run off now, I’ll only mow ya down. I’ll kill you, you know, I’ll make you_ eat _those stinky, pissy fucking -_

Something soft circled Richie’s wrist. It was Eddie’s fingers. He held it on the bare skin under his sleeve, as though it were half-melted, careful. He said, “we got one! Come on Rich, we got one!” and the rest of Richie’s body melted too.

They had indeed got one. Richie was tripping over himself as Eddie yanked him over the curb to the now still, purring truck pulled up on it. Oh God. This had seemed so fruitless five minutes ago Richie had halfway accepted it wasn’t going to happen. He’d almost started thinking ‘bout what to pester his mom to make for dinner. And now he was climbing and strapping himself up into a strange Virginian man’s car and comprehending this all over again. Right from square one. 

At least Eddie was still holding him. He was doing all the talking too. “Oh, shoot, thanks so much,” he blustered, popping in his seatbelt. “We’d been standing out there practically all day. You all drive so fast.” 

A little tap-tap came as the man blotted out his cigarette through the window. He turned around with yellow teeth and a fatherly sort of look. “Of course. Wouldn’t want to leave a pair of kids in the rain,” he said. 

Eddie snickered falsely. “Yeah, you’re the first. How far south are you headed?”

“Home. Maryland.” 

“Sweet. Can we stay the whole way?” 

The man clearly hadn’t been expecting this. He was shocked, visibly, but it wasn’t a particularly emotional sort. Not like Richie’s mom at dinner the other night. Staring at her quiche and letting her tears fall into it like a snot-nosed kid. This guy simply rubbed his forehead a little thickly, and then nodded. “Sure, alright. Stay the whole way. I’m stopping overnight so...you know. You know, you probably…”

“We have our own money.”

“Right. All set then.” 

It was small for a truck. On the inside, at least, with a dachshund dog interestedly panting all over the back and the windows drawn up stuffy. Richie’s hair was stuck to his face from the rain and everything felt very close. There was newspaper under his feet, presumably something to do with the dog. Sandwich stains on the seats and old, murky bottles in the pockets - Eddie grabbed his elbow over that last one. He had his tongue in the side of his cheek and his eyes wide. “Booze!” He labelled in a stage whisper. “Booze glorious booze, huh?!” 

“What are you off to Maryland for?” The man asked up front. He’d now produced a bottle of his own, which made Eddie squeeze Richie’s elbow tighter, but it was only Gatorade. “I’m Sam, by the way.”

“I’m Eddie and this is Richie. We’re actually going to Kentucky but will figure out other arrangements from Maryland. We’re going to see my dad.”

“Brothers?”

“Oh - oh no! Friends. We’re school friends.” 

Sam eyed the two of them in the overhead mirror amicably, adjusting to this new perception. Richie felt insanely nervous. The roads were tearing away like notepad pages out of the window. Home had been balled up and thrown in the trash at least five minutes ago and his radar was now totally off. “Your dad sounds like a bit of a hard-ass,” Sam went on. “Making you hitchhike and travel alone and all that. He doesn’t like coming here?”

Eddie’s face snatched into defensive mode. But then he didn’t really do anything with it. “No. No, yeah, he doesn’t like coming here. He’s a little sick. My mom doesn’t want us to be around him for that reason so we’re...having to go secret.” 

“I’m sorry to hear it. You be careful with secrets. They get out of hand.”

“This one’s a good secret.”

“No doubt about it, just...you tell your mom you’re on a field trip, something like that?”

Richie watched Eddie’s irritated expression out of the corner of his eye. It was then he realised he didn’t actually know what Eddie told Sonia himself. Permission from his own mom and hard-earned cash had seemed like such an ultimate he’d forgotten to ask. He pinched his own thigh guiltily, head down, as Eddie went on, “that’s right, Sam. A field trip to DC.”

Something hot and wet pushed through Richie’s hanging hair - a snout. It was the dog’s snout. His glasses knocked around the force of its happy nose and Eddie looked over his shoulder. “Oh, she just likes your smell,” Sam offered. “She just thinks you’ve got a strong smell.”

“Wow! Neat!” Richie scrambled for his glasses precisely as the dog sent them zigzagging again. “Um - what’s her name?”

“Tessie. She doesn’t bite.” 

“Hey Tessie. Hi Tessie.” He gave her a robotic little pat on the head. Richie didn’t think he could get much stiffer but, alas, now Eddie’s fingers were scuba dive jabbing him in the rib on top of it all. The shorter boy was giggling like crazy, free hand between Tessie’s ears. He was good at these kinds of touches. Richie turned to watch and it hurt somewhere. 

“Come on, strong smell,” Eddie tittered. The knot in his face had come untied. “Give her a big kiss!”

Richie gave a strained snort for the sake of the conversation, cringing as Tessie’s tongue hit his nostril. She was taking the whole of his face down like a bonbon. “You’re seriously, like, completely comfortable with all of this?” He said, voice quiet under the licking. 

“I do have a dog.”

“No - this ride? We’re gonna stay overnight with him and everything?”

Eddie gave him a look he’d been giving him since he was ten. An ‘oh, come on’ look, or a ‘grow a pair’ look, depending on how much they’d been bickering. His eyebrows raised into his hair and he looked vaguely deer-like. “Of course I am. This is literally the ideal planned scenario to a tee. It’ll be a motel, plain and simple.”

“We just have literally no way of telling he’s not a creep.”

“Your mom knows exactly where we’re going and how, so. If you aren’t back for brekkie in a day I’m sure there’ll be some kind of search party.” 

Richie nodded the best he could with the weight of Tessie’s entire upper half boring into his cheek. Hair dye, he thought randomly. She could smell his fresh black hair dye. “What about yours?” He asked carefully. “Like, what does she know about this?” 

A pause. “Nothing,” Eddie said after it.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. She just thinks I’m at school right now.” 

This was up there, with the worst things Eddie could possibly have said. Sandwiched between ‘she knows everything and is three seconds from chasing us down’ and ‘I shot her dead before I left’. Richie gaped at him self-consciously. But then he swallowed it. The further this situation blew his mind, the more Eddie saw him as a big, bumbling piss-baby, most likely. And no matter how high the stakes were, that always mattered to Richie. He always looked at himself through Eddie’s eyes. Like, it was becoming humiliating. 

So he kept his face calm for him. Pictured himself as a noble prince. “Well, avoided a tricky discussion,” came his best noble prince voice. “Are you worried about that?”

“Not really.”

“I’m not either then. I don’t want to be worried and then make you worried.”

Eddie raised his eyebrows good-naturedly. Sam had flipped the stereo onto what sounded like a Bee Gees song and it had both their faces crinkling, in the back. The kind of quiet-loud, private-shared moment Richie was really growing to live for. “Well then, selfless Richie,” Eddie said with a hand over his mouth. “Can you do something else for me?”

“If you want,” Richie said slowly. 

“Can you let me pillow you?”

“That sounds a bit…”

“Sleep on you,” Eddie said bluntly. “Can I sleep on your shoulder?” 

Richie touched over his shoulder, as if this had torn it bare. As if he might have had a perfectly good shoulder his whole life but the second Eddie Kaspbrak needed it, it’d be gone. It wasn’t. Thank God. Richie’s throat was doing a rattle but he was at least somewhat equipped for this. Even had a fluffy, koala-shaped cushion in his bag from his grandparents’ trip to Bondi Beach last summer. “If you want to. It’s my bony side though,” he said, tugging on those backpack straps.

“You said you’d sit with your soft side on me!”

“That was before I fuckin’ panicked!”

He turned to look at the road again, even though it made him a bit sick. It would only be weird if he stared. Richie watched a little girl rubbing her ice cream all over the neighbouring car’s window instead and noted the new weight on his arm. The thatch of Eddie’s hair, the squidge of his cheek. “It’s not too bad,” he said into Richie’s sweater. “Bony-wise, I mean.”

“Oh, well. Nice,” Richie squeaked back. 

“Goodnight then?”

“Yeah, goodnight.” 

This weight bore deeper, deeper, then drifted into nothing. 

The drive was long and neon-colored and Richie barely slept a minute of it. Time worked different in places, situations you weren’t really sure of how to handle. Too much of it bogged down on processing the seat beneath your thighs and the scent of the air. Or maybe something bigger than that - like how time worked different in space. Cosmic forces and all. Richie counted every bright yellow McDonald’s sign and copied Eddie’s breathing the whole way through. 

Eddie was the only piece of home left. Richie clung to that on the drive harder than he ever had. The sleeping boy had broken off his shoulder and curled himself down flat around ninety minutes in, and Richie could finally find ways to look at him without feeling bad. He could turn around to study the lake on the left side and, as his eyes skated back across dry grass and cement, catch on Eddie’s eyelashes. They looked longer like this. His face looked older. Must have only been the light in his eyes keeping him youthful and boyish - the soul. 

The little sleep Richie did get was in one of those moments, of looking at Eddie’s eyelashes, ‘cause he dreamed about them. Or, like, the commercial version of a dream rather than the whole movie. It was the Kentucky one from before again. This time Eddie was there. The only thing you could make out for miles in the orange-blue desert. He was crouching small; holding his schoolbag with his face ruched on it and his butt in the sand. 

_“Please,” dream Eddie had groaned into the fabric. Spit strings on his lips like stitches. “Please stop making me sad.”_

By the time it drowned out, Richie was waking up in Pennsylvania. 

“I really want to get home early tomorrow, you know, as early as I can,” Sam was saying, when they were out of the car and bleary-eyed at midnight. Padding through the parking lot of Molly’s Motel, all lit up red. He was smoking again. “Seems you got plenty sleep on the ride though, so. Up at the crack of dawn I hope.”

Eddie gave an embarrassed titter. “Yeah, of course!” He said in a high voice, hair sticking to the side of his face. “I’ll be up as early as you need.” 

“Good to hear it. I’ll see you at the reception at say...6?”

Richie hadn’t officially started his day at 6am since, literally. Ever. “See you at 6,” he cut in all the same. They’d taken their keys from Molly herself at the motel desk and split down opposite corridors with all six eyelids drooping. 

Eddie was walking with his feet slightly one in front of the other and his arms folded over his stomach. He let Richie unlock the door, despite usually liking to be the one to do _everything_ , and leaned back against the brown wallpaper with an awkward look about him. 

“You slept like a lil’ baby, huh?” Richie teased cautiously, watching him over his shoulder as he tugged at the handle. 

“Sleeping long and well is more a sign of maturity but sure.”

“You got a stomach ache or what?”

“No. Something much better.” Eddie followed Richie into their boxy bedroom and threw himself to the first bed like a pouncing cat. He kept Richie confused for a few more seconds, wrapping his legs into a pretzel shape on the covers and raising his eyebrows. But then he lifted his shirt up. He pulled a huge, sloshing bottle of whiskey out from under it, the very same that had been in Sam’s passenger seat back pocket, and flourished it. “Pretty tricksy, right?!”

Richie’s knuckle flew up to his lip. “How the fuck…?”

“I’m literally, like, praying Sam doesn’t notice.” 

He followed Eddie to the bed with his elbows quirked out, face doing a half-gasp, half-grin sort of thing. Richie flopped down with around six inches left between the two of them. (There was a tape measure in his head reserved just for these operations - it worked faster than God.) “He’s a hundred million percent gonna notice,” he marvelled. “Probably not ‘til we go, though.”

Eddie curled a fist around the lid and stared at Richie a moment. Or, at the gap in front of Richie. Then his eyes flitted off and he popped the bottle in his mouth. 

“You’re not meant to drink it like that, you fuck. We’re meant to go down and get some Cola or something.”

The sharp scrunch in his face said Richie was right. Eddie turned and passed to him with green cheeks. Even this pose made him look strong, somehow, sweater sleeve crawling soft up his forearm. So strong Richie went red. “It’s literally the most disgusting thing in the world,” he croaked through a giggle. 

“So you’re passing it to me.”

“Duh. We’re like Siamese twins.”

Richie sipped what tasted like electric puke and wheezed. “Oh my God - do _not_ call us - twins!” He coughed hard.

“Why not? We do everything together.” 

He looked back up to find some odd, vaguely challenging look on Eddie’s face. He’d now draped his arms up over the latches on the window. It was raining in Pennsylvania, too, so hard it made the walls groan. His thumb lay over the lock like he was daring Richie to swat it away. And Richie didn’t know whether to be scared or endeared by this for the life of him. 

“It just feels like a weird label,” he said, sipping again, foolishly. Eddie took his hand down from its daredevil pose and took the bottle for himself. “We’re close and stuff.” 

“I know. I’m yanking your chain.” 

“Then stop it. I’m way too tired.” 

Eddie’s face stayed the same, even as that disgusted, whiskey-struck ripple ran through it again. Even as his eyes were getting ever so slightly crossed in the middle. “It’s good that you think we’re close and stuff,” he said dreamily.

Richie lowered himself so he was laying on his side, a sickness creeping up his neck. He watched Eddie just now the way you watch tapes from when you were a baby. When your parents still loved each other and Sparky the dog was still running around. A weird, expired admiration; admiring all the parts of Eddie he could have had, before, if things hadn’t gone horribly wrong that night in the wardrobe. Admiring a bud of something special that never truly flowered. It was too late for Eddie and him, Richie noted randomly. 

“What, that’s an unpopular opinion?” He slurred. 

Eddie tilted his head sideways so he could look Richie in the eyes properly. The six inches had probably crunched to around four, but this all of a sudden didn’t matter. Richie all of a sudden was aware he was in a new state on a new adventure and this came with new laws. “No,” came Eddie’s voice through this epiphany. “I mean, it wasn’t. Before. I just thought I might have upset you recently.”

“I thought I might have upset you.”

“You did. But I forgave you really fast.” 

Richie closed his eyes. There was cold glass being presented at his lips again but there was a lump in him, now. Blocked out all the taste. “Why?” He whispered oddly. “Or, like...how? Did I upset you?”

The rain yowled harder than ever. Eddie’s voice was quiet. Yet still, it rang over all like a call-to-war horn. Because it said: “kissed me.”

“Doesn’t that make most people happy? Because my...I did it because in my head I thought it’d make you happy.” 

“I can’t be kissed by somebody who doesn’t really _love_ me, Richie. That’s just so fucking depressing.” 

Richie let his eyelashes un-thatch a little. Not looking at Eddie, though. Only the damp and the bird pecks on the ceiling. If he’d have been looking at Eddie he might have said something really dangerous. He might even have started crying. 

This was hurtful in a way he had never anticipated. All this time Richie had been aching ‘cause he thought Eddie didn’t like him that way, he was too impulsive, he just had awful breath. Feeling the way he felt about Eddie and knowing that he did had been the only sure, stable point to cling to in it all. And it wasn’t enough. The ache reached its fissure point and none of it had even been worth it. Richie could have puked.

Eddie broke the silence, which was only ten seconds, but felt like an age. “Have you kissed anybody else like that?”

“I...um…”

“Just me then.”

Richie chanced a look down at Eddie’s hands. They looked like they’d been sewn. Like if he picked and itched at them a bit of loose lace would gape. “Assumption, much,” he said, voice coming out oddly giggly. Eddie gave a cooperative snicker which sounded slightly tearful. 

“Come on, Rich. You wear an undershirt. Don’t really take you for Casanova.”

“How is that remotely...how do you even know that?!”

“Everyone knows that. I can only hear so much ‘Richie Tozier wears a bra’ banter before hockey practice ‘til it starts to get ingrained.” 

Richie was starting to feel seriously woozy at this point. So much so he was letting off big, real belly laughs. Privately he sort of hated the way Eddie could bring up these things so flippantly. Being with him was the only state on earth in which he didn’t feel like a total loser and it pissed him off to think maybe Eddie didn’t see it like that. Alas. In this moment - choking on this whiskey, heart this broken - Richie Tozier wears a bra was probably the most hysterical rumor in the world. 

“You stood up for me though, right?!” Richie giggled breathlessly. 

“I did! I - I hit Kenny McKinley with a freaking ice-skate.”

“You’re _literally crazy_!”

“Yeah. Yeah, I literally am.” Eddie’s laughter was tuning down into hiccups and he was staring at the bottle with lazy eyes. His face was the pinkest Richie had ever seen it. “And I...I need to tell you something, actually.”

“Go for it crazy-head.” 

A pause, one that told Richie now was time to shift back into normalcy. Six inches reinstated and no more laughter. But his body was just too light for it. “You know when we were talking in the car earlier. About leaving Derry and my mom and all that stuff?” Eddie said. “I, um. I didn’t tell her about what we were doing or anything because I’m not going back.” 

Oh. Okay. That did the trick. Richie lifted his head up slowly. “What?”

Eddie was staring so hard at the bottle tears were starting to leak. “I think I’d like to...stay with my dad after this, you know? I think I just want to stay. And I’m going to need you to do me a really, _really_ big favor.” 

“A fa…vor?” 

“Yeah, a favor. I need you to tell my mom that I’m not coming back because I’m dead.”

Everything was slipping in Richie like he was stuffed with cornflour. He thought he might have been moving sideways, twitching little by little like a fish, but was motionless. Was rolled onto his stomach and motionless as a corpse. “No,” he said quietly. “No, no, no. No, I don’t want you to die.”

“Hey, I’m not gonna die! Don’t panic, it’s all fake. I just want you to -”

“Well I _can’t_. I am not doing that shit. Can’t you just call her and say you already moved in with him and explain everything?”

There were hands on Richie’s shoulders. Ones he had a mindless, frantic urge to struggle against. He was starting to move now. Just rocking back and forth on the blankets and kicking his feet in a miniature frenzy. “Don’t be a dick, Richie,” Eddie said firmly. Richie’s eyes were blacking out and it sounded like Eddie’s voice was coming from the sky, like a god. Judgment Day. “You know that wouldn’t work. She’d track me down and I’d be trapped again. I’d be sad again. This is my only chance.”

“Your only chance at what? Getting away from me?!”

“This could not be less about you. I...I’m not well with my mom. I’m getting so fucked up. Don’t you want me to get better?” 

Richie started to cry. This had to have been a horrible fever dream. And now he knew why he’d felt so offended, on the phone yesterday. When Eddie said this was his self discovery. His getting better. Because, pathetically, Richie’s own self discovery and getting better had always, always been Eddie. And it was selfish and bratty but he wanted it the other way round, too. He wanted some great childish saving each other type of deal that could never exist for anyone let alone Richie Piss-Pants Big-Mouth Tozier. The only thing saving Eddie was quite literally a thousand miles away from him. 

“I don’t want you to die, I don’t want you to die, I don’t want you to die,” he whimpered. 

“I’m not going to die Richie. I’m not gonna be dead.”

“ _I DON’T WANT YOU TO DIE!_ ”

The hands on his shoulders became arms over his chest and back and neck. Richie couldn’t feel the barest little swipe of them. He was sobbing with his mouth open like a child. This had all been so much bigger than him from the start. Kissing Eddie, loving Eddie, whatever the hell was going on inside of Eddie. Richie was not built with big, important feelings like this in mind. He was not really even built to be loved at all. And the more he sobbed and broke under the weight of all this the more this was proven. His own worth dropping faster than a funfair hammer game. 

Eddie was holding him. Or some other version of him, in another universe. His head had been steered down to the pillow and Eddie was holding him tight from behind. One arm around his middle and the other up finger-combing his hair. “It’s okay, you. It’s alright,” he whispered through the pain with his thumb over the curl of Richie’s ear. “It’s gonna be alright.”

“It’s not without you.”

“You aren’t without me. I’m right here, silly, can’t you feel me?” Eddie squeezed him softly. He rested the combing hand flat over Richie’s hot cheek. Funnily enough, sleep was starting to come. The world was so cruel and bright just now his brain was zipping out of it. “You will always have me. Dead or alive, I’ll just be yours.” 

“And...and me? Who the hell am I - gonna be?”

“Duh. You’ll be mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so sorry this took a bit!!! i haven’t been doing the best, life has been really busy and this chapter was just generally a super long + demanding one. i also wrote most of this while moderately high XKDKRNZK so sorry if it’s a bit rambled in parts, although i think it works pretty nice :D


	6. home stretch

Car engines moaning; sun the color of cereal. Richie woke up with swollen eyes barely a few hours after falling asleep. 

The night had flown by dark and dreamless. Either a bottle of whiskey or a sobbing fit could do that to you, and both together were apparently killer. Richie had gone out like a light while Eddie was still whispering to him. They were curled up like a married couple when the sun was rising, him and Eddie. Callused fingertips on the soft part under Richie’s tummy button, leaving gentle dents. Something he had wished for on every eyelash since he was twelve and, now he had it, made him feel utterly alone. 

Something was meant to be born, being held like that; a princess and the frog type of deal. And whatever that something was had died instead. 

Richie watched the windowsill for a little while, before getting up. Feeling Eddie’s breath in his ear and holding in a wry laugh. Then he pulled himself loose to sit and look outside properly. 

It was all parking lot, flat, dry road and a stretch of cornfield. Just like home but with everything a bit browner. Everything a bit lonelier. He watched a van shudder by and tried to think of last night. Most of it was already blacked out completely - a sign of a bad one. 

He didn’t turn around when Eddie’s side of the mattress creaked. The bed was tiny, only one of two titchy singles, and every twitch came out like a storm. Richie was too embarrassed to react to it. Even after Eddie’s weird little, “oh, it’s morning, good morning,” he just kept on staring out at the road.

“Good morning,” he said back, after a bit.

The delay was copied. Or maybe he’d copied off Eddie first. The air between them was thick and very weird. “Did you sleep alright?”

“No. Mattress is ass.”

“Same here. Your farting didn’t really help either.” 

Richie whipped around with a baffled look on his face. His curls had gone tough and tight, just like that night with the bleach (only this time bleached by tears), and bounced in his eyes. The Eddie he found through the kinks of them was soft and vulnerable looking. His features had this bizarrely wet look about them, just now, like someone had fanned them out with a paintbrush and let them drip. For the first time in what now appeared to be weeks he looked calm. 

“You - says you. Says you who was breathing all over me like a dog all night,” Richie stumbled hotly. 

Again, for the first time in weeks, Eddie didn’t fight back. He didn’t even giggle. He just shook his head with that quiet, blissed out look, and said, “you’re my best friend Richie.”

They stared at each other for a moment. Both trying to work out what this meant, even Eddie, despite having dealt it. Both trying to work out how the world would keep on turning from here. Then the alarm started ringing for six and the streetlights outside the window cut off. And it was silently decided that, against all odds, the world just would. 

All their heavier bags were left in Sam’s trunk, and so they’d emerged at the front desk looking the exact same they had as last night, the same wrinkled sweaters. The heat seemed to have crept back overnight and Richie was sweating like crazy. Sam was already there, of course; you could see him fidgeting from the very top of the corridor. 

“Ah, bad night?” He’d said, anxiously blunt. He was doing this awkward hovering pose around the desk that reminded Richie of his dad. 

“What?”

“Did you have a bad night? You’re both looking tired.”

Eddie touched over his own cheek self-consciously. “Oh...right, yeah. Mattress was ass,” he said, thumb on his left eye-bag. Copycat. “Just kind of want to get moving as soon as.”

“Eddie’s dad won’t be out of the hospital for too long, so,” Richie contributed - being sad was making him oddly generous. 

“Exactly. Plus I don’t suspect the buses will run regular, not to his little town…”

Sam looked between the two of them with that sort of recalibrating look he’d given them yesterday, in the overhead mirror. The one when Eddie told him he and Richie were friends and not brothers. It made Richie wonder if he could feel it, the sad stuff. If he was recalibrating from the two boys that were laughing and sitting close in the back of his truck yesterday and the two now dying in the motel. 

Said truck was smelly and fur-covered as ever, when they’d all clambered back in. Tessie took the trunk this time and Eddie the passenger seat up front. This didn’t really feel symbolic or cruel or anything. Even when he and Richie were good, really good, he always sat up front if he could help it. Was smart with roads and all that. Or at least which curse words to hurl at them. 

“So, Derry Maine,” Sam was prompting. The moment the car got rolling he’d put down all the windows and his hair was whipping about his ears. “You guys are from Derry Maine.”

“Horrifyingly, yeah.”

He made a hooting noise. “Jeez. You boys don’t have much time for it?”

Eddie was pulling his sweater off, grunting as the collar got stuck ‘round the snub of his nose. He had a tank top underneath that was also something to do with hockey. The Derry Beaver emblem glared from under the headrest. “More that it doesn’t have much time for us,” he said breathily. “Small towns, you know. Spooky and mean.”

“I see. Still, can’t be that small if it makes the paper, I wouldn’t think.”

“Well it - how do you mean?”

“The paper. Newspaper. About those robberies and thugs and whatnot.”

Sam gave Eddie a little half-glance, confused. Eddie’s expression was twice as much. “Mrs. Norton’s house made the _newspaper_?!” Came his high voice. Richie leaned for those browning, clumpy papers on the car floor and picked up the freshest one. “Like, a non-Derry newspaper?”

Sure enough, the print in Richie’s hands was a Pennsylvania gazette. And Derry, Maine, was mentioned on the fifth page of it in pure black ink.

**SMALL MAINE TOWN IN GRAVE DANGER - OF TEENAGERS.**  
_Following a wild weekend of robberies, vandalism, and local disappearances, the small beaver trapping town of Derry, Maine, has finally put itself back on the map - in the gravest way possible. Locals believe a group of vicious high schoolers could be behind it all._

_“People don’t lock their doors here,” Mrs. Karen Norton, a victim of this rampage, told us on the Friday evening. This is where it all began: her home on Dragonfly Drive. It was ransacked while she was visiting family and almost nothing inside it was spared, including her television and pet poodle. “Or their cars. Nobody owns a safe,” she added tearfully. “People live in Derry for that sense of protection, that’s its pull. And now it just feels like the whole town is ruined. Everything is ruined.”_

_Mrs. Norton’s home was not the last. Just over the course of last night, two more homes have been invaded and vandalised. One, number 7, is left with bright yellow spray paint over its front steps and the other, number 4, a smashed window. Both of them were on Dragonfly Drive. Police suspect the teenagers carrying out this terrorism must live closeby._

Richie looked up from the paper, crestfallen, to find Eddie looking back at him. To find that softness in his face from earlier had now gone away. He couldn’t tell whether this was comforting or worrying, but he didn’t have time to, for Eddie was snatching the paper out of his hands before the thoughts could ever take root. And then he was back in the present. 

“It’s - it’s all on my fucking road. Those houses are all right next to my fucking house,” He said, bite in his voice. 

“Oh my god.”

“Number four is my _neighbour_. I literally ate dinner at number four eight days ago,” Richie went on, scanning the kink in Eddie’s eyebrows. He was getting some odd, painful sort of hope out of this. Like if Derry got hurt and shit on bad enough Eddie would feel sorry for it and want to come home. “What if they think that’s me?!”

“Uh, hello?! You’re halfway across the country. That’s an alibi straight from the hands of God.”

“You never know though. Don’t all the criminals, like, go on the run?” 

“And then pop back over a night after they leave just to give old number four a shock. R-iii-ght.” 

Richie snorted dryly, pushing his tear-fried bangs out of his eyes. He could see his mom on the porch in the back of his mind. Gave him an eerie feeling all of a sudden she knew, that morning, when she said ‘enjoy your trip’. She knew some psycho dog-napper would be putting the fear of God into her while he was away and wanted him to feel guilty for it. But then he thought of Davey, probably sitting in her lap. Reading the back of a pizza place flyer to her. And Richie all of a sudden decided his mom had just been sad, and he didn’t blame her for that, and he really missed her. 

The drive was much shorter and chattier but felt much more uncomfortable. Richie felt much further from home. On the way up here, Eddie had helped with that, but it was a different sort of sight now. Eddie with that odd, oh-so-pleased-to-be-free grin on his face, Eddie laughing oh-so-hard at Sam’s oh-so-dull stories of suburban Virginia. He could have been from Mars.

Richie wondered while watching this if he had never actually loved him. It was something that could easily be read wrong, looked at funny, after all. Eddie Kaspbrak had been presented with the greatest, most golden ticket to happiness of all time and Richie wasn’t glad for him one bit. This seemed to break every rule of love. 

But then they were stopping for gas. Right on the cusp between states, at a rickety little place called ‘Jinxie’s’. And Eddie turned around in his seat with his teeth out, after Sam had gone, and exclaimed, “god, my _entire crack_ is numb,” like a kid. And Richie knew that he had actually loved Eddie forever, and he would continue to love him no matter how miserable or bad at it he was, and it was all a big mess but it was true. It would always be true. 

The thought burned out like a candle in the ocean and heat filled the car. Love just fit too tight on some people. That was okay. 

“You wanna get out? Feel the sunshine?” The smaller boy said. He’d taken a little receipt from Sam’s glove compartment and started rolling it up to put it behind his ear. “It’s like someone just forgot to put clouds in the sky.”

Richie pushed his hair back with both hands. “Naw, I’m okay.”

“Oh right. You want to be moody instead.”

This felt like a taunt worse than anything Todd Silvetti could ever spin. Richie was so wounded and angry by this that, yanking his seatbelt out of its socket like a swiping cat, he threw himself dramatically over the whole backseat. Eddie raised his eyebrows. “And you want to be _happy_?!” Richie hissed. “After last night you’re telling me you’re so fucked up and you want to be dead…? How does that even work?” 

Eddie’s face stayed frozen while his body popped the car door open, sticking his shins out. “I didn’t ever say I wanted to be dead. It was literally just a cover-up Richie, I told you. You’re being wilful.”

“Sorry, I forgot. You only want to be dead to _me_.” 

“Oh my God. Again with the me, me, me. Your mom really raised a spoiled little brat, huh?!” 

Richie sat bolt upright so fast he winded himself a little bit, but Eddie’s eyes weren’t even there. His car seat was empty. Then there were hands on Richie’s ankles. Eddie had taken the liberty of popping open both doors and was looming in Richie’s like a vision from God. Bafflingly, he still seemed to be set on the sunshine. 

“I - I am _not_ spoiled for missing you,” Richie said, letting his legs go limp. 

“You aren’t. But you’re spoiled if you hold me back.” 

They stared at each for a moment. The station doorbell chimed in the distance. “Lets just…” Eddie started up again. “Lets just forget about this, okay? I haven’t even met Dad yet and I don’t know shit about anything. I mostly only started this ‘cause I was drunk.”

“That’s not true.”

The hands on Richie’s ankles gave a tug that was meant to be little but yanked him halfway across the backseat and gave him fabric burn. This often happened. He and Eddie were usually so rough with each other that the times Richie did randomly decide to turn to putty in his hands made for horrible accidents. Eddie made a choking noise and held on tighter. “It is too!” He squeaked, a giggle starting to peek through. “It’s true. I spoke too soon, the...my whiskey was too delicious.”

“Delicious?!” came Richie’s exclamation, with bonus random voice crack, which Eddie found so hysterical that his arms spasmed again and Richie was flying out onto the floor in a lump.

“shi-AGH!”

“Fuck - whoops - are you - ?!”

“ _Ass bruise! I’m gonna get an ass bruise!_ ”

“Oh fuck! Oh no, fuck! Sorry!” Eddie cackled over his deer-like flopping and screaming. Richie’s elbow scuffed the mouth of the car door. He wrangled his arm backwards in a dusty mess to free the huge, warm bottle of water Sam had offered for the ride and unscrewed the lid - vengeance via Evian. 

It sprayed all over Eddie’s shorts like a feral skunk, making him flail too. Richie could have lunged forward and given the backs of his knees a tickle to end the war right here but, alas. Totally impossibly, Richie was starting to actually have fun. 

“What the living hell was that for?!”

“For my purple butthole.” 

“Dude, you are so _fucking_ -”

Richie gave the bottle a thick squeeze right across the middle, right into Eddie’s open mouth. The impact of this crunched him like a paper doll. Now they were both on the floor, and Eddie was groping for Richie’s head like something out of a movie scene, water turning his eyelashes gooey. Likely to pull him into some kind of death noogie or a wrestle or something. Just as those strong, tan knuckles reached Richie’s head, he was struck with so much hope. Eddie was alive. He was really alive. Derry could never kill or crush anything even half this bright. 

Then the slow-motion puppy scuffling was cut through sharp, by Sam’s awkward voice: “uh, fellas?”

The two of them paused like video game characters. Eddie’s left hand was in Richie’s hair and the other vice was gripping his shoulder. Both of Richie’s were fisted over Eddie’s chest. Sam loomed above them with a look of genuine anxiety on his face, rocking on the heels of his work boots.

“Hey! Hey, sorry, what’s up?!” Eddie scrambled. He fell back to his butt abruptly, and then he was hopping up and scraping the dust off his knees. Let Richie take his watery arm for balance. “You don’t have enough cash or something?”

Sam picked at his jeans childishly and shook his head. “Oh no, certainly not. I, uh. I just thought I would let you fellas know I think we may have been robbed.” 

“R-robbed?”

“The truck, yes. It appears half its contents just seem to have...disappeared, you know? And I figured that the motel was pretty sketchy, and so it would make sense. I just wanted to apologise.” 

A thin, silver snake of sweat ran from the top of Richie’s neck right down to his waist. “Did you leave it unlocked?” He asked hoarsely. 

“I must have done.”

“And what did they take?”

Sam itched his ear. “Alcohol, drinks and such. And..um..your bags.”

Eddie did a blink that looked almost reptilian. That almost made a little clicking castanet sound. The face of a thief out-thieved. “Well - well that’s totally fine! It can’t have been your fault!” He said with his voice all too fast. “We were probably asking for it, with the trunk all jam-packed and...and I think to make it easier Richie and I could probably just fix up a coach from here.”

The expression Sam wore was completely, perfectly in the middle of confused and guilty. Not knowing what fuck Richie and Eddie were doing but knowing all too well what he himself had done. He was rubbing the creased part of his forehead again - probably a nervous tic. “That’s understandable, yes,” he said quietly. “I really am sorry.”

“It’s no worry! Travel light anyway! Could you - um - point us to the station?”

Sam held a sad thumb up over his shoulder. “There’s a coach shelter if you follow up this road to the left, until you come to a sort of tree-ish area. Just keep walking through those trees until you see a big, yellow -”

And before he could dream of finishing, Eddie had crab-grabbed Richie’s elbow, and they were marching off into the dust with barely a wave over the shoulder. Marching, then speed-walking, then sprinting like hell. 

“You _asshole_ , I didn’t even hear what he was saying!” Richie shrieked, sweater fanning his bellybutton as he ran. Eddie looked like some kind of big cat beside him. Running like a cheetah and grinning like a lion. 

“Big yellow whatever, I got it. I couldn’t just stand there while he tried to work out where his whiskey went.”

“And our bags. Who the fuck took our bags?!”

“I don’t know but I think I’m in love with them.” 

This made Richie sort of curve in on himself, which was very awkward while trying to run fast, but they didn’t have much longer to go anyway. The road was slushing into trees just like Sam told them it would and even Eddie’s strong legs were starting to kick out at funny angles. He held his stomach, petering out at the mouth of the woods. Face all lit up and happy like he’d just eaten a hearty meal. Then he put those hands over his head, stretching, and finally over Richie’s cheeks. Which sort of made the sky go purple for a second. 

“Home stretch, right?!” He breathed. 

“Y-yeah. Not long to go.”

“You been having fun?”

Richie’s eyelashes fluttered under the crook of Eddie’s thumb. He was blushing. Badly. “Um...Like a mixture. Ups and downs. Right now is probably an up though so, yeah, been having fun.”

Eddie grinned, satisfied with this. It was really hard to place what he ever wanted for Richie or for the two of them. To work out who he was ever trying to be. But just now, magically, he’d become an open book. Richie knew and trusted perfectly in this moment that Eddie would protect him forever. And the force of it was sealed as Eddie leaned up on his tiptoes, and planted a neat kiss on Richie’s forehead, gently. A gentle shield. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am once again apologizing for taking a long time to write this!!! i might change my update time to every two weeks as opposed to weekly as my irl schedule is just getting super busy with college starting but...now i say this i know ill randomly end up breezing through the next chap :’) we will see! just know i love this story with my whole heart and writing it is bringing me so much joy!
> 
> P.S. over halfway through this thing so...really is the home stretch


	7. pop

Eddie stood on his own father’s porch with his face turned up to the clouds. It was an old, worn little thing. Classically southern and bathed in yellow-ish leaves, the tinkle of windchimes. He’d started out sitting on the rocking chair. And then far back against the railing. And now he was on the doormat, looking over his shoulder, thoughts up in the sky. 

Richie had taken his place on the chair, which was something Eddie had taken great annoyance with. Apparently the squeak of the rolling wood was a ‘coping mechanism’ when he did it and a ‘fucking headache’ for Richie. Neither of them were really angry at one another, though. Neither needed forgiving. 

Since they’d gotten the coach eight hours ago they hadn’t actually been angry for a second. A world record. And a sign; one that Eddie was going through something, or putting himself through something, which Richie actually managed to understand. 

So they were being gentle with each other. Sweating out in the middle of Frenchburg, Kentucky and looking after one another like wild wolves. Silence and mosquitoes. 

“You know, a lot of people don’t answer knocks nowadays,” came Eddie’s first words since they’d mounted the garden path. He’d been standing in silence with a paw-like fist up for five whole minutes. “With all the sales people and...mormons and stuff. My mom doesn’t answer knocks.”

The plastic case of Richie’s shoelace had come loose on the walk and he had it between his teeth, just now. “Your mom also doesn’t wear deodorant.”

“You know, just this once the conversation is not actually about razzing on my mom.” 

“I’m just saying. I think it’s a Missus K thing.”

This sent Eddie’s face muscles through some sort of military workout. He stared at Richie with his eyebrows contorting up a storm and his knuckles creeping ever closer to Franklin Kaspbrak’s door. It was probably really hard to think of his mom, now, although not as in painful. Just hard. “They were married, Richie,” he said in a strange tone. “They could easily be identical. My mom’s things could just be my mom’s things ‘cause she copied them from my dad’s things.”

Richie sighed. He looked out over the spooky little avenue, the sprinklers in every yard washing it in unison, then back at the door window. There was apple-print curtain pulled over the other side of it. “Then you know what you’re dealing with, I guess,” he said with a shove of his glasses. 

Again, Richie’s words had some unusual impact on Eddie’s face. But this time it was a still sort. A soft sort even. “He better fucking like you,” Eddie mumbled. “Hope he likes you.” 

“Same here. I feel like he won’t though.”

“You think he’s gonna be horrible?!”

“No, I just mean most people don’t like me.”

Bingo - Eddie had rolled his eyes. And his voice was low, snarky, when he said, “oh, I forgot, woe is Richie.” Low and snarky enough to get the world back in motion again, ‘cause, surreally, he’d managed to knock on the door while saying it. 

Three clear knocks, right in the middle. That number felt weirdly significant. It stayed silent. 

“Was it too gentle?” Eddie asked groggily. “The knocking.”

Richie offered one of those weird, sad little grins that were the only kind of grins acceptable in stressful situations. That you didn’t need to smile back at, although Eddie did. He was giggling at his sneakers by the time Richie said, “you’ve never done anything too gentle in your life,” with his teeth popping out. 

There was another stroke of magic in this moment. Just like there had been driving to Pennsylvania, when Sam put his awful music on the radio. Just like there was on every after-bedtime phone call they’d shared since twelve years old. A Richie and Eddie against the world type of deal. Richie liked to think of it like that ‘cause it implied they were both from a different one, an alien planet. Like they’d shared enough quiet laughter to build their own sky and moon and dirt on the ground. 

Whatever happened on planet earth could be dealt with at arm’s length, when you held that logic. And when the soft little clink of someone unlocking the front door came, when it started to sweep open, Richie all of a sudden felt he could handle it. He hoped Eddie could too. 

A short, round-faced man had emerged. He stood on the welcome doormat in flimsy sandals and was wearing a housecoat. 

Green-brown, curling eyes, a nose that was short but sharp. Oh yeah, this was Eddie alright. Risen from postcard ashes and back from the dead with milk on his chin. 

This was _Pop_.

Eddie was staring at him wildly. His face had gone white, as opposed to the stormy sort of purple it went when he was going to cry, though his eyes were still going dewy. That was normal, Richie figured. He’d probably be more shocked if he was something he recognised here.

Frank Kaspbrak, on the other hand, had a totally neutral expression. No movement and no sound but the kind of look you wore to watch a spider crawl up your car window. They were frozen for what felt like an age.

“Hey,” Eddie said at last, in a totally unrecognisable voice. About to break or already long broken. “How are you?”

When Frank didn’t reply, that’s when Richie knew he definitely knew. The scene became that of father and son and Frenchburg all of a sudden seemed a familiar place. Frank’s hands were starting to twitch up in front of him. 

“You’re…” came his old voice. “You’re a teenager.”

“I’m seventeen, yes.”

“And you’re here. From -”

“Derry,” Eddie said, his eyes filling with tears. His head was doing a heavy sort of tip forward. “I found your postcards. Letters. Mom hid them in the - fucking laundry my whole life.”

This filled the void. Be it the void between them, the void in Eddie, the void in the sky. All of it just got filled. For Frank’s twitching hands had twitched so far as to wrap around his son’s shoulders. And then the twitching became real, soft, fatherly embrace. He cupped the back of Eddie’s head preciously and held it against his own chest. It was an oddly slow and calculated thing but one Eddie melted into immediately. He pressed his nose into his dad’s pyjamas with his eyes closed, streaming with tears, and just sort of emotionally fell asleep there. Let himself be small. 

It was the first time Richie had ever seen a grownup hold Eddie like that. Horrifyingly, it was probably the only time he’d seen Eddie _loved_. Not in the friend way. Not in the stupid little crush way. The way you’re loved when you are very first born; the way you were put on this earth for. 

A long, hurtful chapter was over. 

The house was small and kitschy and the apple-print was a recurring theme. Frank had framed pictures of cats in the dining room. There was a rug under the table that made up a rainbow. 

That’s where they’d all staggered to first, after hugging and crying on the porch for twenty minutes. Sitting around with coffee mugs as if to discuss a business matter. Not that Frank was particularly business-like or cold; he couldn’t keep his hands off Eddie’s cheeks and the scruff of his hair for the life of him and hummed Doris Day whenever the room went silent. He was just sort of awkward.

“I..I’m a little scrambled by you, you know,” he was saying through the steam of his drink. He was staring rather a lot but Eddie was too. Accent only subtly southern. “You getting here. I didn’t think you’d be able to get away like that.”

“To be honest I kind of wasn’t. She doesn’t know,” Eddie said quietly. “Please don’t call her or anything if that’s okay.”

“I haven’t called Sonia in ten years.”

“Oh, right. Okay.”

Frank sat his chin in his hand as a little cat came scampering in from the backyard. It made a beeline for Richie’s legs. Oh, god - strong smell strike two. Eddie watched this with a tear streaked face for a moment before his dad was talking again. 

“Said I was _dead_ , huh,” Frank murmured. 

“Pancreatic Cancer. We had a vase for your ashes and everything but I have no idea what must have been in there all this time.”

“My bets are on cake flour,” was Richie’s side-note. 

“Yeah, cake flour, exactly. She also cried every time I tried to ask her about you and stuff so I couldn’t really get anything from there. We didn’t even have any pictures up ‘cause it ‘upset’ her too much.”

Frank had a heavy look on his face, and was now staring directly at Richie. He hadn’t acknowledged him much apart from the awkward little ‘this is my friend’ Eddie gave out on the porch but that had all been under the dizzy spell of tears. Since he’d piped up with his flour idea Frank Kaspbrak had suddenly registered him as a person. 

“Sorry, I...remind me who this is?” He asked his son, with a soft little housecoat-ed nudge. For the second time in recent weeks Richie found himself pretending he was in a 1950s rom-com movie. Sat at the dinner table with awful black coffee in pursuit of a father’s capital B blessing. 

Shaking it out of his head, he knocked his glasses up with a knuckle again. And then did a smile where all the teeth were showing at the side of his mouth, a little red. In his mind’s eye he looked a bit daredevilish and charming but in reality looked kind of like a ferret. “Richie,” he said. “I’m Eddie’s best friend and, like, road-trip partner. From school back in Derry.” 

“Well isn’t that nice. I really thought I recognised you for a moment.”

“I was on the TV once? You see that national math-smash thing last year?”

“Uh...No, no, I think I missed it.”

Richie sniffed, looking from the cat licking his sockless toes back to Eddie’s dad. “Maybe my celebrity lookalike then.” 

“Back to what I was saying though,” Eddie cut impatiently. “With my mom pretending and everything, I just wanted to know if you knew why she...sort of why she did that?”

Frank rubbed his chin and then nodded. Which felt surprising. It was such a great long mess and mystery and the idea of any sense or knowing in it almost felt wrong. “We weren’t married very long. Only a few years, I think, just long enough to have had you. Then have known you a little bit,” he said. “Your mom...around that time she really didn’t hold up well at all. She loved you a lot, obviously, when you were born but it - it had some strange effect on her. Started to get paranoid and angry. Very strict.”

“You had to leave her?” Eddie breathed. 

“No, actually, the other way around. I won’t lie that I didn’t think about it because...you know, being with her was hard. We fought a lot. But for your sake I didn’t want to. She forced me out when you were three because she thought I was taking you away from her, something like that.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It sounds like it but I’m not. You seemed to...always take to me more. You were a daddy’s boy, you know, she wasn’t in a state to handle that.”

Eddie stared at the tablecloth with his mouth a little open. There was something blooming behind his eyes and cheeks, something storming. The longer Richie looked at it the more it became clear that this something was _happy_. Eddie was spaced out to Jupiter and his eyes were truly, genuinely happy. All the things he ever worried about were no longer real and the things he hoped for were planted, proper. Like a child woken up from a nightmare to Christmas morning. 

“I understand,” he said gently, after a moment. “Dad?”

Frank’s face seemed to glitch. “Yes?”

“I’m _so_ hungry.”

There was a diner in town that Frank swore by, one with sweet tea and chicken sandwiches, and he had them both slipping back into their sneakers to walk over there. Richie and Eddie hadn’t seen much of Frenchburg on their way in. At least not properly. They’d cut fast down another wooded track and hadn’t spoken a word to each other nor taken their eyes off Eddie’s shaking green map.

Walking behind Frank’s glowing bald spot, now, the town seemed realer, fuller. There were dogs sleeping on sidewalks and stickers on windows. A bake sale flyer on every signpost they passed - _SWEET, NEAT, OUT IN THE HEAT! Just two dollars will get you a treat!_

Eddie walked a little in front of him, too. He’d slipped back into his dirty old sweater despite the air being so thick you could almost see it. Every now and then he’d peek over his shoulder, fingers outstretched and dusting over mailboxes. There’d be an enchanted look in his eye.

Richie’s smiles were nowhere near as pretty, but he gave them every time. He liked this. He liked that Eddie liked this. 

“Are you seeing anyone?” His dad was saying just beside him, as they crossed a bridged stream. “Back at home?”

“Like a doctor…?”

“No, like a lady.” 

“Oh! No, not just yet.”

Frank gave a falsely knowing little chuckle, a straight man to straight man sort of tone. Something his son was meant to relate to. Richie cringed into his shoulder but Eddie didn’t seem phased. “What about you though?” He asked with his voice level. 

His dad lifted the chuckle into a suck on his teeth. “Well actually...yeah. Yes I am. A fine lady. She lives with her daughter just up this way actually.”

Eddie stiffened. Frank clapped his shoulder gently. 

“Only since last month. That’s when I started seeing her,” he said. “A fling, if you’re into that talk.”

“How old’s the daughter?”

Frank scrunched his face up while he thought, something that reminded Richie so much of Eddie it made him jump. Their surroundings were growing a little more metropolitan, as they walked, dirt turning to pavement. As metropolitan as a town half the size of Derry could get. There was a bike store on the left with a giant, super-power fan pelting at the doorstep and Eddie looked into it with a conflicted expression. “About fifteen, maybe sixteen,” his dad said at last. “Bit younger than you, she...the local high school’s just up there.”

“I wanna see her.” 

“You - what now?”

Eddie turned away from the fan with his hair hanging in his eyes like bangs. He blew it out, and gave an earnest shrug. “It’s three o’clock. We should go see her and say hi.”

Frank didn’t look so sure. Made Richie feel like he understood something in Eddie that most people didn’t already, after knowing him for an hour. If you knew anything about this particular sheen on his cheeks or this particular low tone he was speaking in then you knew you should probably get him at home in his bedroom away from all other human beings A.S.A.P.

Alas. Even more impressively than understanding Eddie, Frank also seemed to quickly love Eddie. And so he popped his knuckles at his chest, gave another point towards the school, and had Eddie’s scuffed, squeaking tennis shoes take the lead. 

Frank’s ‘fine lady’s daughter, or to most people Chrissy Colgate, was sort of not worth the fuss, as it turned out. She was tall for her age, dressed in a purple-gold cheerleader’s skirt and a cardigan. A face that curved in on itself and dark red hair pulled smooth into two ponytails. Frank had Richie and Eddie watch her from afar when they reached the school, standing at the steps with their arms folded. He went off first to ‘explain’. Was whispering frantically to her over the top of her ring binder while Eddie was gnawing his bottom lip.

“What do you think he’s saying to her?” Richie asked, head cocked sideways and feet twisted over each other. He held them together like claws sometimes. Pigeon toe. 

Eddie squinted at him. “What do _you_ think he’s saying? Must be pretty fucked up and weird to just...have a kid all of a sudden. Would take me ages to explain it all out.”

“I know, I know, I - I just wanted to hear your Frank impression.”

“My what?”

Richie did a chicken-wing nudge, snorting at Eddie’s stunned sort of look. “I wanna hear your Kentucky accent. This is mah kee-d a-a-aaaay-die kind of thing.” 

Eddie’s eyes were getting wider and wider, which was for a moment hysterical, and made Richie feel extremely pleased with himself, until he worked out that he was actually looking some place over his shoulder. Over at the gates where all the rest of the Frenchburg kids were streaming out. A big parade of sundresses and football shoulder-pads and, just under the spotlight of Eddie’s deer eyes, curly black hair. He was staring at some boy who’d just set himself down under a tree to fix his hair. 

“You found another Kaspbrak?” Richie teased awkwardly, looking back at Eddie. Seeing him in this environment with the knowledge that some little slice of it was his home was weird. He was happy but didn’t fit right. Like he had his arms out for Frenchburg but Frenchburg couldn’t quite hold him back. 

Eddie’s eyelashes fluttered. “No. Nobody,” he said quickly.

“Who?”

“Nobody.”

“Don’t freak me out again.”

“Again?! Jeez, sorry my fake-dead dad was such a spooky moment for you.”

Richie looked back to the boy, and then back to Eddie. And with a low pang of horror saw that he was _blushing_. Like, severely. Before he had time to comment on this or truly even work out how he felt about it, Frank and Chrissy had stepped in right between them, and Eddie was pouting his bright red face like a pained puppy. 

“Sorry about that. Eddie, this is Chrissy. Chrissy, this is Eddie.” Chrissy leaned to shake both boys’ hands and a little tinkle sounded; bangles slid out from under her sleeve. She didn’t seem to smile much and smelled of banana. “They came all the way from Maine. Ya know where Maine is Chrissy?”

“Basically Canada,” she said coolly. “Y’all talk real quiet or something.”

Eddie snapped out of his daze, just to give Chrissy a sniffy sort of look. He shook her hand like it was made from metal. “Hm. And you guys talk loud.”

“S’pose, yeah. Life of the party, us Kentucky girls.”

“Shame I’ve got such a headache.”

Chrissy slipped her hands in her skirt pockets and gave Eddie an uncertain look. Brows furrowed but lips still sort of oddly smiling. The way so many of the girls in Derry looked at him. The banana smell was coming from her teeth, which were making fast work of a bubblegum wedge, and she seemed much older than fifteen. Maybe she was. “Okay, well,” Chrissy said in a weird tone. “Good for you then. Frank, me and Gordy got a disco to go to, so…”

Frank looked between the two pensively. “A disco? Why don’t you take these two with you?”

“‘Cause I’m going with Gordy. My _boyfriend_.”

“Surely you could still take them in on your ride.” 

Chrissy was looking hideously reluctant, rocking on the heels of her Mary Janes. But she was also looking desperate. And so she rolled her eyes, slumped her shoulders, and nodded. “Five minutes alone with him, then.”

“With who?” 

“With _Gordy_! Our whole date night is getting _eaten_ , can I have one moment please?” 

Frank gave her a hand movement that meant ‘well go on then’, then looked to Richie and Eddie through the swish of her ponytails. A look that was apologetic as it was excited. “Chrissy’s a little boy-crazy, you see, but. She’s a nice girl,” he said, watching her march. Richie gained another dull sense of panic as the three followed her over their shoulders to see her stop right under the tree Eddie had been fixated on. She flopped to her knees, and planted a kiss on the curly-haired boy’s cheek. 

Oh. _That_ was Gordy. Eddie’s darkening face out of the corner of Richie’s eye seemed to confirm something life-ruining. 

“Now, hold on!” Frank chirped out of the blue. He pointed right between the two lovebirds and let off a little whoop. “That’s where I know you from! Uncanny! Chrissy’s boy is your double, Richie.”

Richie jumped. “Huh?”

“He looks just like you, that Gordy. You’ve got the same look.”

“Oh. Um. Me with, like, a billion dollar face lift maybe.” 

“You tell him Eddie. They’re identical.” 

Eddie’s eyes snapped to Richie like he was being held at gunpoint. He rubbed over his top lip, then looked away again, then closed his eyes like he was praying. “The jaw’s all wrong,” he said distantly. “It’s too sharp. Richie’s is round.”

“Well, I would definitely say that the other similarities -” 

A little zigzag ran through Eddie’s chest, and then he was grabbing Richie’s hand. If Richie was less totally frozen in this moment he probably would have given a wince. It probably would have been more comforting too. But it was something. “There’s no time for any more debating, Dad,” Eddie said crisply, while Richie stared at their fingers. “Richie and I have got a disco to go to.”

Frank stared at them. Richie wondered what he saw. Or rather, imagined what he saw, through incredibly tired, emotionally fried and hungry eyes. Him and Eddie like any other one of these high school couples, where Eddie wore those shoulder-pads and Richie was wearing tube socks. Like they lived here.

An alternate universe where they knew how to talk to each other, how to love each other, and held hands outside the school gates in await of a disco limousine and chicken sandwiches. “Of course, yes,” Frank said, and Richie heard it in a perfectly rehearsed actor tone. “You two go on and have fun now.”

Eddie semi-grinned. “We don’t know how to have anything but, Pop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i made another slightly angstier [playlist for this fic](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/43jtRPlAE2qhkocl6nvJZF?si=cxHDrzg_SduwCbQn4rC3dw)!!! i have severe brainworms!!!!!!! also i didn’t proof read this a huge amount so if you see any horrible spelling mistakes before i do my apologies :’)


	8. hair gel

“You know, you could be so cute if you knew what to do with yourself,” Chrissy Colgate was saying in her sincere southern drawl, staring with her eyes squinted. She had her head tilted on the side like an artist at an easel. “You usually wear your hair like that?”

Richie held a hand over his top lip awkwardly. “Like what…?”

“How it is. Like big and weird.”

“It just kind of always looks like this. I don’t do anything particular with it.” 

She clicked her fingers under his nose, a ‘there you have it’ sort of move. Her ponytails had gone all bushy with either heat or excitement and her eyes were light. Almost a bit like Eddie, when his face had that post-hockey buzz on it. Almost a bit like home. “You see, that’s called a waste of potential. The supermodels in Paris would loathe you.”

They’d gone back to Frank’s place in odd little chunks, the five of them. Chrissy and Gordy storming ahead and waving to seemingly every person under twenty five they passed - Richie figured they were either popular or just super odd. Frank trailing behind and him and Eddie tucked in the middle. They stopped for chicken sandwiches on the way and nobody spoke all that much. Somehow the calmest yet most uncomfortable journey of Richie Tozier’s life. 

Frenchburg seemed kind of like a movie town. Something glossy and pretty in its dirt, something pearly in its litter. It made your heart still but your head skittish. 

Richie couldn’t trust it. 

Now they were back at home, Chrissy had fished her disco dress out of her backpack and wrapped the strap around her neck, so it hung like an apron. Frank was off somewhere fixing sweet tea and, most worryingly, Gordy and Eddie were sitting on the couch. Whispering. They were talking to each other at a volume you’d use to pray. 

“Boys’ talk,” Chrissy had giggled, slipping her plimsolls off at the door. “Suppose you know all about it.”

“Yeah,” Richie had lied.

“Well. For today you’ll have to entertain me instead.” 

And so this is how Richie found himself sitting on the carpet, Gordy and Eddie over his shoulder, Chrissy’s hands all over his face. She was apparently an expert in bone structure and wanted to give Richie some kind of consultation on his. 

“Your problem is your face is so round,” Chrissy said bluntly. A tone that constantly ping-ponged between coming off charming and coming off rude. “It’s soft.”

“Gee. So I’ve heard.”

“Well, I don’t see no good reason you haven’t done anything about your hair then. You can’t change your bones, you see, but you can change the frame around them.” She sucked her bottom lip. “Do you like Johnny Cash?”

Richie dropped his fingers from his face and gave Chrissy a beaky sort of look. Eddie giggled just behind him. “I do _not_ wear my hair like that.”

“And how’s it working out for you, big-head?” 

Chrissy was giving him a challenging sort of look that Richie couldn’t place. Could be one making fun of him, one playing with him, one judging him. It struck him now she had the same sort of light about her Todd Silvetti’s on-and-off girlfriend back in Derry did. Michele Van Saun. Far too cool for ponytails like Chrissy’s but did that same, crinkly look with her eyebrows at everything you said, had that same pixie nose. It unnerved Richie for a second. But then Chrissy leaned to give him a pat on the shoulder, a distinctively warm one, and the second had passed. 

She was getting to her feet. “I’m gonna get you Frank’s hair gel,” she said, with a little tug to keep her tube socks on her knees. You could tell from how Chrissy moved that she was into gymnastics, disco-dancing, all that. 

“What, you’re serious?” Richie bumbled. 

“Duh. If you’re gonna walk into that disco with me you’re gonna do it looking like a nice, proper Frenchburg boy.” 

Her skirt was swishing off behind her like a bride’s train. Richie couldn’t really choose what worried him most about this. Either the fact that Chrissy had genuine plans to do his hair like Johnny Cash’s or the fact he was now sat on his butt at Eddie and Gordy’s feet alone. He chanced an agonising peek around at them once Chrissy had disappeared off into a bedroom door. Relievingly, their conversation had cooled off. 

Eddie was staring at his fingernails and finishing off a chuckle. Gordy was picking at the couch. “You guys finally run out of boys’ talk?” Richie asked, just a little spiteful. Earned himself an eye roll.

“It’s called flow of conversation, Johnny.”

“Conversation, yeah, not fuckin’...soliloquising.”

“How on earth d’you learn that word?”

Gordy stood up, that soft black hair falling out of his eyes. This was the only genuine similarity Richie could find between the two. Richie’s hair before he burned half of it out of his scalp, and if he’d known back then how to style it like a _proper Frenchburg boy_ , that’s what Gordy had. “You want a can of pop, Eddie?” The latter asked in a deep accent, preening at it again. 

Eddie rubbed his hands on his thighs and looked between Gordy and Richie, looking stressed. “Sure. And Richie too.” 

“No, actually, I’m not thirsty,” Richie snipped. 

“Fine then. Just me.”

The weary sort of crease in Gordy’s eyebrows ever since this whole interaction began was making Richie irrationally angry. Acting like he’d invaded the space or something. You couldn’t invade boys’ talk. Richie saw it in the locker room all the time. Anyone with something cool enough to say, shoulders squared enough, could storm in with a towel on their hips and take the mic. Gordy probably didn’t see Richie as someone with something cool enough to say, by that logic. And so Richie watched him stalk off to the kitchen with a red face. 

“Why do you want to embarrass me so bad?” Eddie stage-whispered, lunging for Richie’s shoulder. “I don’t understand. You go this whole trip good as gold and now I’m finally home you want to embarrass me.”

Richie got dizzy a second. “What were you talking about with him?”

“We weren’t talking about anything.”

“So it’s a secret from me…”

“Please stop it.” 

Eddie’s touch over his shoulder softened. Richie hunched forwards like you see the detectives do on TV - the episode finale, where the most important cop leans right in and hisses _we can do this the easy way or the hard way_.

What he intended to say here was ‘you have the hots for Gordy’, but halfway through discovered this was really embarrassing to say aloud, so instead said, “you have an _attraction_ to Gordy.”

Rightfully, the smaller boy looked horrified. “What the hell, Richie?” 

“Like, you think he’s good-looking,” Richie attempted to fix. He was oddly abysmal at talking about this sort of thing for somebody who thought about it so much. Supposed that was often the way. “Come on, we can talk about this stuff now! ‘Cause we’re both, you know…”

“Don’t be gross.”

“Why do you insult me _every_ time I talk about my lifestyle choice? It’s natural for us to chat about desirable men.”

Eddie let off a snort. “Maybe ‘cause you say shit like ‘desirable men’.”

“Dude, you’re gonna give me such a complex.”

A soft snick came from the kitchen as Gordy pulled out two cans. He’d opened his own and was chugging it right there, as if it were beer. Richie could see Eddie’s pupils follow the little stream of it falling down the boy’s chin. He looked kind of like a flower. 

“We were talking about Chrissy mostly,” he said after a pause. “If you really must know. Gordy was telling me embarrassing stories about her. All the popular kids apparently went on a camping trip last month and she ate a bunch of weird orange berries and crapped her pants.”

Now Richie was feeling guilty for pestering. But the side of his mouth crooked up all the same. “Oh god. That’s disgusting.”

“I know right. Nobody saw but it’s still brutal,” Eddie chuckled, voice trailing. “And, um. I was telling some stories too.”

“About me?!”

“ _No_ , Richie. About...about my girlfriend.”

Richie stared at Eddie so hard the background behind him turned blue. “You’ve got a girlfriend,” he said, sort of more to himself. 

“Of course I haven’t. I just made one up. Her name is Suzie now apparently and she lives back in Derry.”

This whole trip seemed to have sort of been a challenge for Richie, a contest with himself, to see how far he could understand Eddie. How many weird, sad things he could watch the person he loved do and be alright with. This seemed to be something of a final round on that. Seeing that death-knell glint Eddie had in his eyes, Richie thought he might fail it. On purpose. He thought suddenly now might have been the time to give up on all this. 

“If...If you stay here,” came his last dying breath. His hair fell in his eyes, “Are you gonna say that? That you’re not gay and you...you’re missing Suzie and stuff?”

Eddie opened his mouth but didn’t get a chance to do anything with, for a dark purple shadow now fell over him - Chrissy. She’d re-emerged with some gaudy suede jacket and a tub of hair clay. “Oh my _god_ , Frank has so many cool shirts ‘n’ all,” she singsonged, yanking Richie up by the arm while he stayed transfixed on Eddie’s face. “Seriously. I don’t know where he wears all this stuff.”

“Wow. Richie’s gonna look awesome,” came Eddie’s quiet voice, flashing a small smile. Chrissy was marching back off down the hallway with Richie staggering in her wake. 

“For sure!” She chirped over her shoulder, with her voice bouncing off the ceiling. “So I’m gonna fix you up like a real it-boy, you know. Like the boy version of Miss America. Some girls like it when boys look a little rough and dangerous but me, oh god, not for me. I like when a boy looks like he..”

Chrissy’s voice rumbled off into at least six more minutes of pure rant. Richie couldn’t hear any of it. His own voice in his head was all too loud; it was still crying, over and over again, _what about me?!_

The makeover took an obscenely long time, and Richie’s head kept up this way almost the entire time throughout. He perched on the end of the spare room bed with his ankles crossed and Chrissy rubbed sludge around his ears, looking weirdly like a couple themselves. Richie watched her work in the mirror and toyed with this. With what life would be like if he played the game Eddie wanted to, if he had a girlfriend. He figured he could make that work. Was good at loving things. Even the things he wasn’t built to. 

Richie with gelled hair was, in his own opinion, just as horrifying in practice as it was in theory, but to Chrissy it was lovely. So lovely she had to carry out a bonus fifty other little beauty operations on him afterwards. She shaved his chin with foam, pinched his cheeks, plucked the tail-ends of his eyebrows. Handed him a bottle of Mr. Lover-Man body spray and instructed him to spray it everywhere - “and I mean literally everywhere. Even your undergarments. Especially your undergarments.” 

It struck him midway through changing into Frank’s aforementioned crazy shirt, which was pastel blue, that Richie had wanted to do this to himself for a long time. Something deemed for better, more beautiful people. Chrissy had gone to turn away so he could change but then paused in what looked like terror.

“What is _that_?” she’d whispered, pointing at his stomach. 

“An undershirt.”

Her teeth hung out in a grimace. “Oh my god. No, no, no, nobody’s ever going to kiss you with that thing on.”

“Why does everybody keep saying that?!”

Richie finished looking like something out of a Madonna music video. Shoulder-pads, quiff, perfectly pink cheeks and all. Admittedly this was sort of stupid, by his standards. He looked like the kind of guy he’d do an impression of at one of his and Eddie’s sleepovers, legs tangled on the couch, watching commercials at 1am in their pyjamas. But lo and behold. Poking over his clean face, neck craned right up to the mirror, Richie couldn’t say he _felt_ stupid. He almost felt sort of nice. 

“Here,” Chrissy said gently, her hands snaking around the corner of the reflection. She slipped his glasses off with a lacy touch. Now Richie couldn’t see what he looked like at all. He could, however, say he felt _beautiful_. 

When Eddie looked at him in the living room with a look totally different to the one he’d thrown at Gordy earlier, one so much deeper, Richie’s head finally went quiet. Life and disco-partying and being in love finally felt okay. Who knew Johnny Cash hair could have brought him such peace. 

The disco was at the high school, same one as earlier, and so they drove by all the same sites. The signposts, the bridge, the bike store. Frank’s car was decently sized and smelled of cheesy hotdog. A scent that apparently was very clingy; by the time the four of them escaped off into the school, sunset up ahead dark purple, Richie could still smell it on his collar. 

They’d emerged in the gym hall. It hadn’t been decorated, but someone had brought in a purple party light. To the kids already twirling about the place this seemed to be more than sufficient. Richie finally had the answer to his earlier question: Chrissy was popular, not weird. Or at least maybe both. She’d taken Gordy’s elbow and swanned out right to the middle of the floor the second they were in, giving all the girls one-armed hugs. The other dancing kids seemed to think they were a sweet couple.

For the second time today, Richie felt jealous. But this kind was a lot easier to deal with. It was dark and hot in here, glasses-less eyes weak enough to sweep said couple right out of view, strong enough to see Eddie standing next to him. That’s what really made this easy to deal with; Eddie.

“You know, that suits you a lot more than I thought,” came his godsend voice. He was eyeing the top of Richie’s head with crinkled eyes. “That lumpy thing.”

“A quiff.”

“I’m not saying that word.”

Richie snorted, defeated, and leaned against the gym wall. He watched the smaller boy wrap his arms around the little bit of climbing frame behind him. Funny, Eddie was such a spark. He was so awkwardly bright and clear and just now he was acting like a total wallflower. “What do you think then?” Richie asked cautiously. “About Frenchburg. Your dad. Everything.”

Eddie unwound his arms like he’d been caught doing something wrong. “Uh - good, yeah. Yeah, I like it here. Makes me happy.”

“You don’t think the people are a little weird?”

“No more so than Derry.”

“So...so you’re all set to move in.”

His face hardened, then softened, then hardened again. Richie tried to pick which thought might go with each slack of the cheeks. Leave Richie, stay with Richie, leave Richie, love Richie. “I think I might just do this the real way,” he said after this. Eddie was wearing one of Frank’s shirts too, only he’d rolled the sleeves past his shoulders, and he looked really tough. That was just the thing about him. All his pain was tough. “I don’t think I wanna mess this up, Rich.”

“How do you mean?”

The DJ dropped the needle on _You Make Me Feel_ and it felt wildly inappropriate. Everyone on the dancefloor cheered. What Eddie was trying to say over the top of this racket was, “tell my mom, fix it up with my mom, so that we can still talk and hang and stuff,” but he was once again overtaken by a southern girl wearing streamers in her hair. She’d slid in midway through their conversation and now loomed over them like a werewolf, patting Richie’s arm. 

“Hey, stranger!” She chirruped. “You wanna come hang with us?!”

Richie looked from the girl, to Eddie (who was pressing his knuckles to his mouth in slow-rising hysteria), to his shoes and then back. Oh Lord. His heart was already going through so many loops after what he’d just heard. Like, he was genuinely faint. “Oh - um, I’m so ass at dancing,” he blustered.

The girl blinked, and pulled on her own ponytail. “No, just hanging out. I like your accent.”

“Right. It’s not very strong.”

“It’s duh-reamy.”

“Ah. I got it from my...dad. His is strong. So I’d say thank you but, like, it’s a very out-of-my-hands, developmental kind of…” 

A noise ripped out of Eddie like his head had just unzipped. The girl gave his giggles an affronted little sniff and then held her hand out to Richie, a sense of finality about her. “Are you going to come and hang with me or not?”

Richie leaned sideways and his hip bumped Eddie’s. “No thank you,” he said, in the most polite tone he’d ever used, which still came out horribly rude. “Well, not like - Well I need the bathroom first. I need to pee a little.”

“You can’t just hold it?”

“Historically, no.” 

The girl smoothed down her dress and gave him a sore look. Richie no longer had the patience to engage with it. He gave her some odd, strained thumbs up as a ‘goodbye’, grabbed Eddie forearm, and pelted for the corridor doors ‘til he was out of breath. Eddie was cackling like a dog and both their sneakers squeaked so loud on the cheap flooring it almost sounded like part of the song. 

Richie bent double as though he’d just run a race, stammering to a stop in the hallway. He frantically fanned his hands under his armpits and watched Eddie laugh himself into a zombie fit. “Jesus Christ, Richie!” He half-choked through it. “You finally get a girl that doesn’t think you’re a piss pants and you _immediately_ tell her you’re a piss pants!”

That earned Eddie a jab to the ribs. “I am _not_ a piss pants. Plus, unlike you, I am not actually trying to dance with any girls, like, ever.” 

Eddie flopped himself over some display board about healthy eating, arms out wide either side of him. Letting all his wheezes run out. It was sort of strange, them being so out in the open as this in a school corridor. Mostly at Derry High Richie felt he might be doing something wrong if he looked Eddie in the eye where people could see it. At a Derry school dance it’d probably feel so wrong that Richie would avoid him altogether, and they’d fight about it for weeks. Here, anonymous, Richie felt so free he could kiss Eddie on the mouth. Right here, standing on gum-stained carpet.

“You’re trying to dance with a load of boys then?” Eddie asked teasingly.

Richie actually managed a decent job at not blushing. “Not a _load_ , but.”

“But just one?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Eddie picked a little piece of blu-tac out from under its food table poster. A slower song came on in the hall. “You…” his voice swerved out. “You want to dance with me?”

Richie kept brutally still. Like if he twitched out of this exact position, this exact amount of air in his lungs, he might give the wrong answer. It was important to stay in control during situations like these. Richie’s control was freezing. “Is that something that you would be interested in tonight?” Was his next, steady move. 

A snicker. “What, are you a waiter or something?”

“I’m asking you a question.”

“I’ll have the lobster thermidor, please. That garlic butter on the side if you serve it.” 

“I’m _just_ asking you a question.” 

And so, Eddie answered his question. Not with words of course. Never with words. Just a hand against his hip. The touch came in lighter than whipped cream, at first, like Eddie was testing it wouldn’t make him jump - which it did. But successfully, it didn’t scare Richie away. He stayed there under the touch so patiently. Richie stared down at both their knees as Eddie flattened his hand there, cupping it, and then pressed down the other one. 

Something gently electric hit his palms once he lay them over Eddie’s shoulders. It was like this was the seal. Like in these moments where they were both touching each other and trusting each other something was born. Richie was starting to laugh behind his teeth at the sheer magic of it all and Eddie was starting to twirl him around. This love of theirs was starting to heal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kudos & comments appreciated :3 we’re getting near the end!


	9. courtney

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW for a brief hint at sexual activity between two adult characters and for. like. a lot of emotional pain

Frank was supposed to pick them up at 8 and have the car parked since 7, but they were the last ones waiting at the gates. Richie, Eddie, Chrissy and Gordy, all sat kicking their dress shoes on the grass outside the school while seemingly the whole town drove off. Fluttering skirts whipping off behind car doors, bow-ties unclipping and sitting on dashboards. Frenchburg was going to sleep. 

“Good thing it’s not so hot tonight,” Chrissy muttered, taking her left ponytail out. She looked like an awkward mermaid. “If I was gonna have to sit here and sweat I think I’d never speak to Frank again.”

Eddie clenched his teeth. “Is he, like, a late person?” He asked tersely. 

“Frank? Oh, it depends.”

“Depends on…?”

“It depends on his plans for the night.”

His eyes screwed up in a move that seemed involuntary, and then he looked over at Richie. Richie’s hairstyle had fallen out and he’d somehow lost his belt. He was watching it all with his elbows back on the grass behind him, looking sort of steam-rolled. Seeing this seemed to give Eddie some weird shot of courage. “His plans for the night were literally picking us up,” he said, turning back to Chrissy, who just shrugged. “He explicitly said that’s what he would be doing with his night. Because I’m here.”

“Look, I don’t know! I want him to show up just as much as you.”

“Trust me you don’t.”

Chrissy’s nose gave a rabbity twitch. “It’s a five minute ride, Bennie.”

“ _Eddie_.”

Richie threw his arm up to check his watch with such gusto the other three jumped. It was coming up to nine and the cross-country travel and dancing was really starting to catch up with him. “Think we gotta just walk it,” he said groggily. Chrissy groaned so loudly he couldn’t get his last ‘k’ out. 

“Neither of you drive?!” 

“No,” Richie said, at the same time as Eddie said, “neither of us have a _car_ present.”

Seriously grumpy by now, the tall, fully de-ponytailed girl stood up and slipped back into the pumps she’d wriggled off. You could tell just by looking at her she’d had a big night. A magical night. That so many people had fawned over her and danced around her and that they always would, that she’d always glow for them. Richie thought he might never look like that in his life. 

Then again, neither did Eddie. Richie watched him staring up at Chrissy with his chin tight and determined and his eyes like granny toffee. He never really looked carefree or totally healthy yet he looked so strongly something else that he had ruined Richie’s life. Finally, Eddie stood up too, cheeks glowing. And then they all started walking across the school lawn onto the gravel, and Richie felt suddenly so free and far from home. 

Dancing made him introspective, you see. Or something like that. 

When they walked back over the bridge he held Eddie’s hand. The first time he’d taken it of his own accord in his life. “I’ll bet he fell asleep,” Richie said as they walked, the knuckles new and round under his own. It wasn’t a particularly _intimate_ touch. More like the way little kids grab each other's wrists crossing the road than lovers. Naive. “It usually happens when you get a shock. One time, my dad was putting a palate expander on Poppy Checa’s braces and she bit his fuckin’ pinky finger, and then the trainee guy had to finish ‘cause he just fell asleep cleaning the wound in his office.”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel tired,” Eddie said, after a snicker. Impressively his voice still sounded close, even though he was worried. He was still here. “I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight or anything.” 

“You were expecting him, though.”

The shorter boy looked to their hands, and then up at Richie’s gel-smeared cheek as they passed below a streetlight. Richie looked back. There were gnats around Eddie’s head like a sick sort of halo. “No, I...It’s weird but I don’t think I was,” he said through their buzz.

“You looked him up in the phonebook, man.”

“I know. But I still just wasn’t.” 

Chrissy barging herself through the front door reminded Richie so much of Carl back home, once they finished their walk. A hot thunderstorm was apparently about to start. Which to Richie just looked like a clear night but to ‘trained Frenchburg senses’ was about to be the worst in weeks. Chrissy was deathly afraid of said thunderstorms, and her shoes were the flimsiest out of the four pairs, and so she’d thrown herself off to the doormat first like a spider. 

That would become something fateful, someday after that. Chrissy Colgate’s pearly purple pumps and the gathering storm clouds. It would probably be looked at like a grand finale. 

For on the other side of her, just above the arch of her shoulder, was Frank Kaspbrak and his lady-friend. Sitting on the couch and attached at the very noisily open mouth. Even without the lamp switched on, it was horrifying. With it switched on, by Eddie, who was standing rigid-shouldered in the doorframe, it was a nightmare. 

The living room saw a few good more seconds of silence, everybody inside it on pause and processing. Only sound was the slow-rising thunder outside and the TV on volume 3, the cooking channel. 

After surely an age of this Frank pulled away with his lips looking like the end of a vacuum and a thin-faced, orange-blonde woman turning around to get a look at them. “Oh - oh my!” Came that oh-so-earnest accent again. Frank had stood up off of the couch and wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was staring at Eddie. “Is it that time - we were meant to - oh! Oh what a disaster!” 

Chrissy was the first to speak, out of the kids. Or the first to make a noise - all that came out of her initially was a long, high whine. Her mother was shaking her head through it and chuckling and Frank was squirming before she’d even finished. “M- _ooooo_ -m!  
_Mom you’re being disgusting_!”

The blonde woman shook her hair back, unphased. She was wearing a purple strappy top with a turtle tattoo on her forearm. “Oh, please,” came her dusky voice. “Like I haven’t walked in on just the same with your Gordy here.”

“That is a hundred percent less disgusting.”

“How’s that?”

“We’re young for starters. Plus it’s never been in front of _guests_.” 

Eddie, who looked as though he was about to throw up, bristled harder than he ever had. “I’m not a guest,” he growled. 

His voice, whether it be the anger in it or just the fact it was Eddie’s, made Frank jump to life again. He curled his knuckles in his tough, ugly chest hair and then whirled left and right. “Right,” he said, tone trying to steady itself. “Okay, lets all just...only a bit embarrassing is all. Why don’t we calm down and have something to eat? I’ll go and change up and Courtney will grab you something to eat.”

“Dad. Can’t we all just sit together?” 

“We will, we will. I need a shirt on for that though, don’t I?”

The woman, or Courtney, gave a sly, three-fingered wave to Richie and Eddie. It seemed there was some unspoken opposite meaning in Frank’s words; Courtney stayed exactly where she sat while her daughter flounced to pull herself cold chicken out of the fridge and he seemed to be satisfied with this. He hobbled off down the hallway with the room left hot and quiet. 

“Not a guest, huh,” was all Courtney offered to break it. You could see her face a little bit better now, as Chrissy nagged Gordy to put the kitchen light on and the woman leaned forward over her knees. She was much younger than Sonia. Her cheekbones were high and heart-like and a manufactured looking wrinkle ran across her forehead. 

Richie crouched to take his shoes off like he was frightened to watch. (He kind of was). “No,” Eddie said from above his hair, resolutely. “Family.”

“Of course. Long lost son.” 

“Yeah. Had to fight and travel a long way to be here, so.”

Courtney tugged at her hair in interest. Her stance was odd, gossipy. Like this was somewhere between a hair salon waiting room and a school canteen. “So,” she repeated. “Did your friend drive you down?”

Richie felt Eddie’s eyes hit the top of his head. His shoelace had barely been untied for a second before he was half tripping over it, standing up. “I can’t drive. I’m Richie,” he announced apparently very loudly. Leaned over to shake her hand and found it stiff and chalky. 

“And you’re here to…?”

“Um. Experience and support.” Richie dropped the hand and hitched his pants up. He looked back to see Eddie still miles behind, still white and unblinking. It was funny, just how different a place this little house seemed now. Its colors, its smells. The porch they’d both been shaking on this morning could have been a universe away. “We hitchhiked. Ran away from Eddie’s mom and stuff.” 

This finally got some emotional response out of Courtney. Something bright and glinting flashed behind her eyes. Richie braced himself for a moment to have just said something wrong. “Sonia Kaspbrak,” she said slowly. 

“What?”

“Sonia Kaspbrak, your mom. Such a...God, a real nasty piece of work.” 

Richie felt Eddie’s warmth creep into him, at last. But it wasn’t all that comforting. It meant that Eddie was cowering. “Dad...he _told_ you about that?” He said in a mousy voice. One that drained all the sincerity from Courtney’s face again; one that made her roll her eyes. Richie’s fists clenched. 

“More like Sonia told me that. Told me that when she called me a dirty whore, what, over thirty times.” 

Chrissy turned from the kitchen with a chicken drumstick to her lips, chittering, “mom, don’t be potty-mouthed!” but it sounded like it came from underwater. Like they were sat on the sand by the ocean and she was out with the tide. Eddie sounded like he was out there, too. He squeaked, “when - when was...?” and Richie knew he was gone. Miles away. 

“When we got Frank out, obviously, never spoken since. When we got him out for Chrissy.”

This was when the house changed again. When suddenly Richie looked down and it appeared there were no longer any floorboards or foundations and looked up to no roof over his head. When the warmth of Eddie shaking into his shoulder-blade became scary, scalding ice. This was when things got bad. 

Courtney blinked at the two of their silent faces and, when her face curved into a smirk, looked like something almost biblical. A devil. “What, you didn’t realise?” she pierced, in a tone that gave away so clearly that she didn’t really have to ask this. Frank had probably been begging her all evening not to give anything away, just like he’d begged Chrissy outside the school, and she’d probably just sneered through all of it. “Come on now. Your old lady was obsessed with Frank. She wouldn’t have sent him away if he’d _shot_ her.”

“When was this? How, like...how did that even work out? It sounds made up,” Richie cut. Just because he couldn’t bear waiting for Eddie to be okay enough to speak and that time then never coming. Just because he couldn’t bear turning around and seeing his face. 

“It’s not made up. Me and Frank got together when your Eddie was a little kid.” Courtney twirled her fingers as though there were a cigarette in them, looking over to Chrissy in the kitchen. This was easy to talk about for her. An epic, true-love getaway story, something to boast about at parties. She was proud of it. “I went to school with Sonia, I knew she was crazy. We were always going to have to make a run for it. Left in the middle of the night and she screamed at us out of the window like a fuckin’...horror movie, then we drove as far south as we could manage. Think Chrissy got half of Eddie’s toys. I don’t know why he had girls’ toys.” 

“If it was when Eddie was a kid then why doesn’t he remember shit?”

“You tell me, honestly.” She pointed those fingers at Eddie directly. Richie chanced a look back, now, and immediately wished he hadn’t. Eddie’s face was crumpled thick. He looked like he was made out of paper. “‘Cause he was definitely here,” Courtney went on, Richie in a helpless little trance. “Sonia was holding him up at the window like some kind of dolly. He was just crying. No wonder Frank agreed to leaving, all that crying. And snot and sickness and…and -”

There was a noise like a crowbar caught in a bike-wheel. The sort of noise that’s so coarse and loud and out of the blue you don’t hear it for a little while, not for at least a second. Richie’s brain had looped itself into a pretzel shape by the time he’d figured what had happened; that Eddie had sprinted across the room, and thrown himself at Courtney like a cat. Chrissy had burst into a screaming fit and Eddie’s hands and fingernails were whirling, whirling, whirling. 

“IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT! IT’S ALL _YOUR_ DAMN FAULT!” he was yowling, strips of blonde hair caught in his grip. Frank had appeared in the living room doorway looking horror-struck. Frozen. “I’M LIKE THIS ‘CAUSE OF _YOU_ , YOU FUCK!”

“FRANK! FR-AAAAAAA-NK, GET HIM OFF ME!”

“ _Not until you’re like me. I’m gonna - break - you like me!_ ”

Frank was moving over so oddly slow for a situation so oddly fast. He was roughly eight million feet out of his depth. Courtney was slipping onto the carpet, Eddie’s scratching, swiping fury bogging her down. Richie caught a little flash of his face, just then, as Frank finally made contact with his shoulders and started to hitch him back. It made him understand so much. Why Eddie stormed out of math class and why he didn’t talk at comic-con and why he wanted everyone to think he was dead. He was giving off wild, deathly sobs and Richie saw some invisible crack down the middle of him. 

“Dad!” Eddie mewled, arms flopping. His fingers were stuck in limp claws and Frank was holding him from behind like how an exterminator holds some wild possum. Childlike. “ _Dad_! You ruined _everything_!”

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry,” Frank said breathlessly. Courtney laid on the floor with her hands clapped dramatically over her head and it all looked like a scene out of a play.

“You were meant to fix it.”

“I will. I’ll try. I’ll...I’ll keep trying to fix it, now that I know what I’m doing.”

“I wanna love you so much!”

“You can.” Frank panted heavily, trying to manoeuvre Eddie into some strained sideways position. Trying to look into his eyes. The best he got was a tear-stained, pink-purple cheek. “I love you. You can still love me.”

Eddie sealed the deal, giving a twitch of his head. He stared at his dad with a totally broken look. And then he was starting to cry, weakly this time, but somehow more sadly. The rage and the shock was so easy to cry about. Looking into the eyes of your back-from-the-dead dad, and knowing he’s not back from the dead at all, he’s deader than he’s ever been before, was not. “You don’t,” Eddie croaked. “And I can’t.”

The spare bedroom had to have been the coldest room you could possibly set foot in, down south in the middle of august. Its walls were painted blue and there was only one single bed with wide, grey carpet under its legs. Teddy-bears propped against the pillows. Frank had forlornly pointed them to it just moments after Eddie’s outburst and he’d whispered, “goodnight fellas,” with the door already halfway shut. Eddie had been turned away from him, face to the window. He didn’t say anything back.

“Don’t ask anything,” he’d croaked after a beat, once they were alone. Richie flattened himself into the wall like a frightened dog. “I heard you take a breath but I don’t want you to ask anything.”

“I mean, it would probably be good for you to, like…”

“It wouldn’t.”

“...talk about how you feel or whatever.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

Richie stared down over his own legs, once again faced with the problem of no pyjamas. That was a nice problem to focus on right now. Nothing existential or huge or flaming. Nothing like the crushed-to-pulp boy he loved so much at the window. 

“You seemed like...um...the situation seems like it would, like, cause one to feel something? Hypothetically? So I feel like maybe hypothetically you feel something?”

Eddie cocked his head by the barest inch, just to see his tense, kinky nose. “I don’t understand a single thing you’re saying, Richie,” he said through gritted teeth. 

“I guess I just feel awkward. ‘Cause I’m standing here in fuckin’ Kentucky and you just went literally crazy so I wish you would just talk to me about what’s going on right now.”

He turned around all the way now, but stared at the wall behind Richie, as opposed to his eyes. It was an odd moment. Like Eddie was about to walk over and hug him and climb out of the window and run away for good all at the same time. Even odder that he did none of those things; no, he just leaned for one of the pillows on the bed and set it on the carpet. Breathing with his mouth open. 

Richie sat down on the duvet with his fingers all wrung up. He felt guilty, somehow. “Hey, lets jus’...hey, I’ve got an idea,” was his fix. Eddie just kept on setting his bed up across the floor in itchy silence. “I’ve got this idea. Why don’t I repay you a favor?”

More silence. “You know like last night when I was crying and stuff and then when we slept in the same bed I settled down a bunch?” Richie went on, the sound of his own voice getting embarrassing. “Can you, like, hear me right now?”

“Talking is not a good coping mechanism for me.”

“It’s meant to be good for everybody. You’ve never been to the guidance counselor?” 

“I either bottle things or explode. And for both our sakes I’m gonna bottle it, so...so just leave it please.”

Richie swung his legs like a child. He was getting desperate. And sort of angry. Who else in the whole wide world would hold Eddie Kaspbrak after he practically tried to kill his kind-of-stepmom, after travelling a thousand miles with him, after leaving every last bit of sanity back in Derry? He had loved Eddie in all the frighteningly unconditional ways the fairy tales told you to and all he got was shaking, shirt-clad back in his face. “You could just cry,” he whispered. “I could...I don’t know. Hold you. You could process it like normal.”

“I’ve never processed anything normal.”

“I’ve never held you.”

Eddie gave Richie his last and only look in the eye, just then. He sat on his knees as if praying with a deep, purple shadow cast from the window on his cheeks. Just like that night on his front lawn, when all of this was such a dream, such a lie. It was a blank look. It lasted for only a second. Then Eddie blinked it away, settled himself down on his pillow, and said in the dark, “my mom says we’re too close.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello wonderful readers!!!! it has been SO frustratingly hard to find time to write this week cuz i am now officially a college student :’D but luckily i fit it in. emotional cuz i am somewhat near the end of this fic and it means so much to me


	10. the sounds of science

Eddie’s fingers dusted Richie’s cheek as light as a spider. He was hovering above, just next to the moon, just between the sheets of lavender either side him. The sky was purple and he was kneeling down in a wild meadow; looked as though he’d just woken up from a nap. 

“You’re hiding,” Eddie said in a rippling voice. “Why are you always hiding?”

Richie wriggled a little down where he was laying. He assumed it must have been grass underneath him, taking in all the low-buzzing flies and the peeling, purple petals, but it didn’t feel like grass. It didn’t feel much like anything. No back of his t-shirt, no weight of the earth. Nothing. “I’m just laying here,” he said back. 

“Laying there and hiding. I wish you would come out and let me see you for real.”

“How do I do that?”

“I don’t know. You should probably start with what you’re hiding from.”

The touch turned from dusty to real. Eddie had planted his entire hand over Richie’s left cheek and it burned as if swept with a match. Richie tried to turn his head away coyly, but the hand kept it steady. Steadier than it had been his whole life. “Start with what you’re hiding from,” Eddie said again, and his face was much closer now, although Richie hadn’t seen him move. “What you’re afraid of.”

Another hand on Richie’s other cheek, so raw and fast the sprawling boy could have cried. “That’s...that’s gonna get heavy, man,” he said with his tongue now straining. His head was working faster than his jaw and it was starting to hurt. Eddie’s face had advanced even further. Noses touching, squished, eyelashes thatching. They were so close you could’ve mistaken them for one flattened body.

So close they were kissing.

Or at least, Eddie’s lips were on Richie’s skin. They puckered over Richie’s cupid’s bow. It felt like a Sunday morning. “What are you afraid of, Rich?” he asked another time, one last time, it felt like. Richie was starting to cry and Eddie kissed over the same spot like a cat. 

“I...you…!”

“What did you say?”

“You,” Richie groaned, tears rolling down to his neck. He closed his eyes and felt the moon might have disappeared behind them. The world disappeared. “I’m _so_ scared of you.”

When he opened them again, Richie learned he was right. For once. There was no lavender or purple stars or moon left. Only a dry stretch of plaid fabric, stained with yoghurt or milkshake and stitched into a seat, with a sleeping boy slumped over it. Eddie Kaspbrak, drooling. Richie had woken up from a dream. His watch was glowing green with ‘7:14 AM’. He was on a coach halfway to Ohio and everything was ruined. 

-

They travelled all morning, afternoon, and evening, an aching majority of it spent in silence. Eddie had been almost sort of alright when they woke up. He’d rolled up his blankets briskly as a maid and asked Richie what his favorite Beastie Boys song was while putting his shoes on. Had a habit of doing that, just like back at the motel. Of sweeping things under the carpet. It was disorienting, but manageable, and so Richie took his blanket for him, then told him it was Shake Your Rump. 

Only after that Frank had been stone cold and speechless at breakfast. And Courtney had refused to sit at the table, draped over the countertops, wearing a lacy housecoat. And Eddie ended up leaving the house with his face the color of ash. 

“Should’ve asked them for money,” was all he’d said, padding down the chalk-stained sidewalk. He held his backpack over his stomach. 

Richie was still wearing his shoulder-pads from last night and his hair had gone dank and stringy from all the product. “Whatcha mean?”

“Well, all things considered, they could have at least given us some money. To get home. The people are too weird to hitchhike here.”

“I’ve got money. I’ll buy a coach.”

Somehow, this didn’t seem to be what Eddie wanted to hear. He gave Richie a distant look. Distant in the sense that, staring at it, Richie didn’t really recognise him for a second. An imposter’s look. Then Eddie put his head back down and marched into the sunrise. 

There were a lot of those looks, throughout the day. It was making Richie’s chest sort of knotty. When they made it to the nearest coach shelter he was sort of starting to feel like someone might have swapped Eddie for another local boy in the night. Used to dream about that, as a kid. About Eddie one day showing up to school with some sort of wire crossed or changed in his brain and not wanting to be Richie’s friend anymore. “Oh please, I’ve got so many other friends,” the nightmare version of him used to say. “Who in the world has all these friends and still chooses to eat lunch with _you_?!” Richie used to wake up with his belly sick. 

He pressed his dollar bills into Eddie’s palm and felt it shrivel under them fast, and all of a sudden knew that feeling again. A shy sort of nausea. An anxiety too anxious to really make itself known. Richie swallowed hard, and waited for the bus with his lips zipped. Panicking. 

As usual, as Richie-and-Eddie culture had been since its start, that panic soon turned into annoyance. Somewhere around Athens, Ohio. Eddie was drumming on the windowsill with his face dark and potato chips in the pouch of his mouth. “The sounds of science,” he’d said suddenly, slipping down his headphones. 

Richie hitched his glasses up from their sleepy, end-of-nose perch. “What?”

“The sounds of science, that’s _my_ favorite Beastie song. I love all the stupid sounds.”

He found his teeth were sort of tight, just now. There was a dull sort of cramp in the side of his cheek. Richie was angry. “Oh,” came its bratty little bite. “Right. That’s what you’re talking about right now.”

Eddie snorted and the anger bore deeper. “You listen to it all the time, Richie. What else would I be talking about?”

“Possibly anything that’s happened in the last forty eight hours. Or, I don’t know, something that isn’t...doesn’t make it so obvious you’re mad at me. For God knows what, I don’t get why you’re mad at me.”

“My favorite song makes you think I’m mad at you…”

“That’s literally not what I mean.”

“It’s literally what you said.” 

Richie violently snatched a chip from the little bag in Eddie’s lap and stared out of the window, face burning. Arguing with Eddie was sort of like arguing with his mom. In the same way that he never truly meant to argue with either. They just brought out something hot and short-sparked in him. “It’s just, like, how you say things...or when you say them,” he muttered tersely. “You’re all quiet like you’re about to burst into tears and don’t want me to talk to you or breathe on you or anything all day. And I sit and get worried as hell. And then I finally think it’s all over, that you’re actually gonna let me in after _hours_ , just for you to make some...some pointless comment about Beastie Boys.”

Eddie’s face didn’t change the whole time he was talking, but that was normal. It was only usually when he spoke himself that the fireworks came out. His voice was dry and crackly; “gee. Didn’t know you had so much feedback for me.”

“It makes me feel like...I don’t know, like I’m not worth anything to you.”

“Okay, stop.” 

“You just choose when I’m worthless to you and when I’m not.”

Now his face changed, but there was a flash of something so alien. So frightening. Something like a lightning bolt slashed sad and searing across his eyes. “You…” Eddie strained, dipping down low now. Like he was crying with no tears. Richie’s chest faltered a little. “You don’t...understand… _anything_.”

A tug ran through Richie’s seatbelt as his middle crunched. “See! See, that’s it! I come all this way with you...go through so much with you...and you still think I don’t know shit!”

“Just ‘cause you follow me around doesn’t mean you know what it’s like to be me,” Eddie hissed. The chip wrapper fell to the floor like frost.

“Yeah, well, I know what it’s like to be me. Being _you_ isn’t the only hardship on planet earth, you know. I have hardships of my own. A shit ton.”

“Which ones are those?”

“Fucking...fucking Todd and all that. That’s serious. My dad said it could seriously stunt my psychological development and I don’t see you dishing out any -”

Eddie’s laughing voice rang hard and loud like a trumpet. Thank god, they were virtually the only ones travelling. Save for a sleeping old lady and a man with his head buried in his briefcase like it was a grave. The sun was coming up and Richie thought his eyes might have had tears in them, as they were shone in, bright pink. “Oh my god!” Eddie half-shrieked. He threw his arms above his head wildly, grinning, and Richie wanted to pounce them back down. “Ladies and gentlemen! Girls and boys! Richie Tozier’s life _is_ hard. Don’t let his dentist dad or his doctor mom or his backyard the size of a baseball field fool you. Not his straight A’s or his night night kisses, no. He’s seen it all, for you see, he has _bladder problems_.”

Richie knew now that this was not Eddie. This was not one of their normal arguments. It could probably never be taken back. “Fuck you,” he breathed in disbelief.

“You know the thing about bladder problems, Richie? They’re psychosomatic. Ain’t no way a well-nourished seventeen year old boy like you just gets dealt a leaky one,” Eddie went on manically. “You let them get in your head and now you pee like a raccoon. See, I know a lot about psychosomatic issues. Back from when my mom used to grind up pills and put them in my macaroni cheese to make me puke!”

“That’s - that is not my fault! You don’t get to act like it’s all my fault all of the time!”

“No, it’s not. It’s not your burden at all. It’s all mine. Me, me, me, I’m dramatic, I’m horrible, I’m scary. I’m ruining _your_ life and just about everybody else’s ‘cause I’m sad about it. About my mom that’ll likely have me dead before thirty and my dad who’s too enchanted with his new kid to even make it to the funeral. I know I’m just crazy for being sad about it.” 

Eddie’s voice descended off into some bizarre, ferret-like chittering sounds and Richie was stuck slumped in his seat. He remembered the night he bleached his hair so vividly at that moment. The last time he felt that sense of something huge, far too huge to be safe, between him and Eddie, and it filled him with so much loss. The last time he figuratively laid himself down at Eddie’s feet like a dog and then felt all the worse for it. 

“I just don’t know what to do about it,” he said brokenly. “You’re right. Nothing’s gonna make me get it. I don’t know what to do.”

“Just stop coming to me for help.” 

“You don’t have to be so fucking mean about all of this.”

Eddie’s eyes flickered dangerously under his brow bone. “I feel mean,” came a whistle through his gritted teeth. “Isn’t that what you wanted? For me to tell you how I feel? I feel mean. And like I’m sick of babying you through my own crisis.”

“I don’t need you to baby me. I just need you to let me in.”

“Maybe you don’t des-”

_”Excuse me, young men!”_

In some tear through time and space, a face had appeared between the two of them. A heart-shaped one with crow’s feet and a ‘staff’ pin several inches below where the chin rounded off. “Excuse me, young men,” she said again, and Richie realised now his back was so stiff he couldn’t feel the tail end of it. He softened himself and Eddie didn’t. “Can I help you? The volume of your conversation is bordering on antisocial.”

Richie whipped to Eddie for a moment, as he usually did in times of awkwardness. The smaller boy looked embarrassed and not willing to talk at all. In spite of himself, Richie found his own lips moving, just after glancing over Eddie’s. “Yeah, actually. You got a phone?”

“What now?”

“A phone. To make calls on and talk to people and stuff.”

Eddie perked himself up enough to manage a little ‘what are you doing?’ expression. The woman brushed a hand over her blouse, irritated. “This is a coach, sir.”

Richie shrugged. He was already shovelling things into his backpack as if she’d responded with a ‘right this way’ and a flourishing hand to her left. “Surely the driver’s got to have one up front, in case something goes wrong, you know?” He went on. The more casual he had his voice sound the more he felt he might break down crying. “I’ve got to call my dad. Emergency.”

Somehow, something in this split-second had apparently conjured a telephone up front. For the woman had indeed stepped back and stuck her arm out to point the way. Just like he’d hoped. He slung his backpack up over his padded shoulder, fabric giving an awkward squeak in protest. “We’ll go home tonight,” Richie said in his just-for-Eddie tone. “My dad’ll just take us home tonight.”

“Richie.”

“I don’t have enough for a motel anyway.”

And with that, Richie was marching off down the coach aisle to the front, shoelaces trailing and body half dying. 

That was seemingly it for him and Eddie, for the rest of the ride. Richie had blustered through the weirdest phone call on earth (“no dad - I can’t stay. I’ll explain it later. I just don’t wanna...is that the lawn mower?!”) and by the time he’d hung up and strapped back down at his seat Eddie was asleep. At least, he had his eyes closed. He wanted to be asleep. Richie was grateful for the silence, for the first time in a long time. He was grateful to be shut out in the cold. 

This trip was always doomed, he always knew it would break something. Or maybe not so much the trip but him and Eddie as a whole. Friendships like this were not built to grow steady, sturdy, not like sunflowers and more like weeds. Eddie being miserable and Richie being obsessed with him could only ever take them so far. They’d dig themselves into holes. Meet other people at college or in new, grown-up towns and try to cheer up a bit. Try to forget each other. 

Richie watched Eddie’s fluttering eyelids and wondered what it was going to feel like. Letting go of him. There was no way on earth he could picture it without nearly _everything_ going left unsaid. 

It was two in the morning when they got off the coach, in Massachusetts. A grimy, rinky little corner of it as the cheapest and nearest-to-home stop. Richie felt the warm-cold night hit his face and realised he couldn’t really figure out what that ‘everything’ was. That there would always be this aching, ugly hole in life until he told Eddie the things he needed to tell him, only whoever tore it there forgot to let Richie know what those things actually _were_. He was given the target and the bow and never the arrow to sling through it. 

Eddie looked sickly, like he’d looked as a kid, hopping out onto the sidewalk. Since he started playing hockey there was always a nice sort of sunset color in his face. Just now it was like dawn. 

“I didn’t mean it,” that was the first thing he said, since falling asleep. Hands in the pockets of his basketball shorts and headphones around his neck like a pet monkey. Richie walked in front of him, trying to keep his pigeon toes straight, hugging himself. 

“Mean what?” he responded, although he knew. Playing the sort of game Eddie often did. 

Which meant Eddie saw straight through it. Naturally. But he still went along with it, which was as good a sign as any. “That you don’t know anything. And that how people treat you isn’t that bad.”

“Oh,” Richie, who had never in a million years pictured getting this far, breathed. “I mean. It’s not on a par with...so...forget about it. I don’t really care or anything.”

“I care. I’ll kill them for messing with you when I get a little stronger. It’s what I think about when working out, you know, punching Todd like he’s a fucking pillow.” 

Richie snickered but there was no real strength in it. “You don’t have to make me feel better right now, Eds.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sorry.”

They walked a little longer, not so sure of where. Wentworth was told just to skid up to the coach stop itself, so they’d only have to loop back, but Richie felt the need to keep the two of them moving a little while. He gave Eddie a look over his shoulder now. One where his eyes sort of looked like moons for a second. His voice splayed out like the fog beneath them; “I didn’t mean it either, though, about you being bad to me. You’re...um. You’re doing a good job with all this.”

Considering all he’d been dragged through in front of Richie, Eddie never really looked all that vulnerable. Just now was an exception. “I do shut you out though.”

“You’re going through stuff so it’s okay.”

“No, it’s…” without it really being announced, both boys’ feet came bumbling to a halt. “You’re a good friend, Richie. You’re a really good friend for coming all this way with me. It’s just sometimes I feel like...I don’t know how far this can go.”

Richie itched his cheek. The first seeds of thunder hummed somewhere nearby and they were facing each other, tummy to tummy. Eddie bit his lip in and looked him square in the face. Brave all of a sudden. “I feel like with me and you things are good but there’s always this feeling,” he went on. “Like there’s a cap on it. Like we can never really understand each other more than we do right now.”

“Don’t you ever think, like, how much we understand each other is enough? I feel like you don’t always have to understand. As long as you like hanging out together.”

“It isn’t enough. We both know.”

Something like the top disc of a helicopter seemed to be running just next to Richie’s heart. Like he was having to suck it in and duck it away every few seconds so it didn’t get diced. “What do you mean?” he said, muffled.

“You know what I mean.”

“I kinda don’t.”

“It’s like...you sit with me at lunch. You always come over to my house and out and about to hang with me. You hitchhike to Kentucky with me. But sometimes I wonder if you would go even further than that.”

The helicopter shut off. Only there was no relief, for so did Richie’s heart. So did the clouds and the earth and all of being in general. All the stuffing ran out of everything until it was all just loose fabric, flapping about his elbows. 

“Don’t,” he squeaked.

Eddie raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

“Just don’t. Do _not_ make me say it. Not now, not after…”

“I feel like if you don’t want to say it then you probably don’t feel it.”

Richie's own knuckles thatched up like thorns at his chest and the rain started coming down. It beat on his cheeks like he was leaning over the bath, under Eddie’s sea-kelp fingers, safe, all over again. God, he wished he could have done this then. He wished they’d have fixed this up like normal people do. “Not after literally everything I have ever...ever done since being _born_ was just so obviously...like, after I’ve made it so obvious,” Richie rumbled. “You can’t just act like it needs to be said now. You’re making a fool outta me.”

Eddie shuffled closer, so that they really were tummy-to-tummy, so that they touched. His face was this weird sort of thunderstruck and hopeful mix. Horrified but happy. That was their relationship, alright. “Then don’t say it. Just prove it.”

“I’ve been proving it so hard I’m practically dead.”

“Prove it again, one last time. There’s one more thing we could do together. The only thing that would get us out of this...this big purgatory.”

“What’s that…?” Richie started, but it was starting to lock into gears before he’d even opened his mouth. His stomach was already starting to drop. Oh, no, no, no. Eddie was curving in on himself ‘cause he was frightened to say what he wanted to and Richie was ready to explode.

The death toll came after a few more seconds of rain. Clear and clanging, shy as a shrinking violet; “what if you didn’t have to go back to Todd?”

Richie tried to half back away but his shoelaces weren’t tied. His heel wobbled and he gave into it. Threw himself to the floor, on his knees, shaking his head like he was trying to wake up from a nightmare. There was something so much worse about Eddie’s plan being proposed like this. As if that night in the motel, around the barrel of a whisky bottle and the scratch of cheap comforter, wasn’t bad enough. Another milestone ruined; the first time somebody Richie loved held him they told him they were going to die. The first time somebody told him they loved him back they asked him to die, too. 

“You said,” he rasped. “No, you said. At the dance. You told me that you changed your mind and that this..this wasn’t…”

Eddie was lowering down level with him but it was like Richie had blacked him out. Like there was nothing in front of him but dark, stormy breeze, nothing but the night. He was keeping his voice gentle and this felt so much worse than any screaming or cursing it gave Richie earache. “We could live in Mexico, Richie. Cuba, Hawaii. We could live on the beach,” he said. “Our lives could be so much easier and...and more fun.”

Richie scrambled up the sidewalk backwards on his butt, scraping the patch of skin where his jacket had flipped up. He kicked his feet crazily as Eddie crawled after him. “I don’t want that, please, I want us to go home. My dad’s gonna take us home!”

“Derry isn’t home! It’s ruined both of our lives, and - and now we have a chance to make new ones. We’re already halfway free, lets just -”

“I wanna go back to normal. Everything’s just got so weird, I just want it to go back to normal.”

“We could be close and love each other and nobody would give us shit for it.”

“Homophobia still exists in fuckin’ Hawaii, you know!” Richie sobbed. His elbows jutted as he landed right in the middle of what was now a fast forming puddle. It splashed weakly under him and he cried, cried like a baby. He had been choosing Eddie over everything his whole life. That came naturally to him. And now when it mattered most, when it was Eddie over existence as he knew it, he was laying in the mud and rainwater at two in the morning and crying because he couldn’t pick for shit. “I _can’t_. I don’t think I can.”

Richie could only see the top of Eddie’s head from here, but he saw it bow. An act of giving up. “Well I have to,” came a little voice from behind his knees.

“You don’t. You can live with me or something. My mom hates your mom and she’ll let you live with me.”

“Richie,” the voice said again, seemingly miles away. Somewhere back in Athens probably. “You can’t run away with me. I can’t go home with you. This is just how it goes.”

“Please…”

“Please to you too.”

Headlights lapped over the street like the heavens had opened up. Oh, god, The water rushed through Richie’s hair and pooled up by his ears and he realised his dad was here. Honking his horn. Over the most crucial moment in his life. 

He flew bolt upright, mud spraying Eddie’s face, which was frightened and starry. Richie looked at it just then and knew for sure that he could never move on. That they were not built to fail, or grow apart, or hate each other. He was not built to give up on Eddie but rather to fight for him. Eddie gave him a long, heavy blink, and Richie saw him on the hopscotch grid again, on the middle school playground. Tiny little hands in fists at his pants, Spider-Man comic rolled and stuffed into the hem of them. He had walked through the gates at age twelve with scuffs at his knees and braces on his teeth and taught Richie who he was.

“I love you,” he said, age seventeen, back in the present. “You’re gonna be alright.”

Richie’s breath was giving up on him and the car horn was honking again. He groped for the front of Eddie’s shirt and gripped it ‘til it was pinging out from under his fingernails like rubber. “No, no, no, I’m not,” he moaned. “I’m _not_.”

Eddie stood up. The trees behind him looked like wings, and he stared out at them, looking very noble. An adventurer about to embark on his travels. A soldier. He was put on this earth for something much like that. For seeing new, beautiful things and climbing and hiking and running. For changing a little of each piece of earth he walked on. 

“You always were,” he said, and that was this adventure finished. The one where he fell in love with Richie Tozier and Richie Tozier fell back twice as hard. He had done all he could here. And now he was pelting off towards the sky, backpack jostling. Off to somewhere he could help himself instead.

Free for a bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me posting this not whatsoever proof read extremely long indulgent angsty aimless chapter i wrote in two days at 4am: What Could Go Wrong :)


	11. fever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warning for a very heavy chapter!! lots of talk of death, violence and bullying + a scene where one character tries to pull another’s pants down (no sexual theme).

Maggie had her arms wrapped around Richie from behind as the sunrise hit their eyes. At least, one, particularly hot little streak of it did; the curtains had been drawn since five and they’d both been staring at the crack left down the middle of them. “You’re burning up,” she said absently. “Good Golly, Richie, you’re really burning.”

Richie still had his shoes on. He’d gotten wet mud on Maggie’s comforter and stared at it now like a bug. “I don’t feel hot.”

“You don’t? Your whole stomach is like a frying pan.”

“No.”

There was a little shift in the air. Maggie was sitting up. She moved her hands to his shoulders now, which were an odd sort of horror movie grey, and flipped him on his back. Richie didn’t mind the dolly touches. If anything he really needed them. When he’d first climbed out of the car an hour ago he’d just stood and stared at the mirror with his face scared and dog-like, shaking in the hallway, ‘til his dad had lifted him up at the waist. Treated like a kid, sure, but he felt like one too. So it was okay. 

“How long were you out in the rain for?” Maggie asked gently.

Thinking of the rain made Richie wince on the inside. His senses had gotten sort of blurry and now the pouring water and the break of Eddie’s voice had become the same thing. “Not very...um. Not a hugely long time. I got really covered though. I layed down.”

His mom felt his forehead and made this tight little face, at that. One that meant she wanted to say something, but was too scared, and thus very sorry for herself. Like she’d already started talking in her head and Richie had already told her to shut up and the hurt had flickered into real life too. 

Richie was too tired to pry for it. “Can you put the smelly stuff on me?” He said instead, exhausted.

“Vaporub?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Can I ask you something important while I do it? So that I’ll never have to ask about it again?”

She pulled his shirt over his head for him. Richie turned on his cheek and blinked at her through the rush of fabric and buttons. Her hair was loose, fallen out of a braid, and she looked just like she did when she used to pick up from elementary school. A forlorn kind of nurturing. “You can ask whatever you want, Momma,” he whispered. 

Maggie unscrewed the tub from her cabinet with a deep breath. “Did you see Eddie die? In front of you?” 

“No,” Richie said, immediately, ‘cause that was an easy one.

“You were distracted with something?”

“I...I was sleeping. I woke up to it.”

“To it happening or to him already being gone?”

The smell of the vaporub seemed to be having some sort of hypnotic power on Richie. It hit him and made his eyes glaze over. He watched his mom draw oily little shapes over his chest and everything sort of slowed down in time with it while he thought of how to answer. Hysterically, Eddie’s death had turned out to be the easiest lie Richie told in his life. The biggest of course, yet by far the easiest. He barely felt guilty for it and he’d looked both parents in the eye, like, six times by now. 

Once he’d climbed in the car earlier that night some weird, clean haze of just _knowing what to do_ had come over him. It was obvious the second his ass met leather. Richie fastened his seatbelt with the most terrible hole in him ever torn - and there were already a lot - turned to his dad with his eyes half-rolled-back and said, as though it were a line in a movie, “Eddie _left_ , Dad.”

Wentworth, who was still in his work uniform and looking alarmed, leaned forward a little frantically. He squared Richie up by the shoulders. Thunder growled hard. “Left? Whaddaya mean left?”

“He’s...He was there and then he...and now he’s...I’m never gonna be able to -”

“Come on, son, spit it out! What do you mean left?!”

Richie gave a distraught little gasp and gripped onto his dad’s wrists. A slug of drool fell out of his mouth; he felt the real pain blend back in with the faux. “He is dead,” came out of him like a picked loose stitch.

The first thing that brought this huge, awkward lie out of him so easily: the fact that it felt _old_. Richie probably could have described Eddie as dead weeks ago if you thought about it all poetically. He could call him dead in elementary school. All his bitterness, all the shitty hands this planet had dealt him; his best friend from beyond the grave. The second thing: technically, it was not even his own lie, but Eddie’s. And using his lie had turned out the next best thing to actually being with him. A secret operation of sorts, a _hey, you take Derry and I’ll take Hawaii, report back after nightfall, I’ll be at your window_. 

The snickering, kicked-back Eddie currently in his prefrontal cortex, marvelling, “oh god, you got ‘em so good. You really got ‘em Richie!” was more bittersweet than anything Richie had ever known. 

And so he thatched his fingers over his forehead, back in the present, and told Maggie straight, “already gone. He went outside to do his stretches. The car took him down at sunrise.”

His mom’s eyes went out of focus, head tilted down at his chest grimly. Richie’s thought process was getting more and more child-like. He wondered genuinely if she could see his heart. “I…” She started to whisper, and then stopped. Her eyelashes got dark. “I _felt_ this. I don’t know how but I really _knew_ this was...I don’t know, imminent.”

“You always do. You couldn’t have done anything, Mom,” Richie said robotically. 

“I tried.”

“You did.”

Maggie had finished with the vaporub and the little puddle of it she’d rolled out went cold. A bird sang somewhere. Sounded like a hymn. “Do you wonder if there’s some kind of...some kind of twisted lesson in this?” came her barely audible voice underneath it. 

Richie’s face twitched. “Huh?”

Those eyelashes were full of tears now. Maggie looked like she was about to properly, deeply weep. “You and that boy are _so close_ ,” she said brokenly. “So close, Richie. The kind of close where all these bad things just start to happen...a magnet for bad things...”

“Mom, I don’t -”

“It’s nothing you did wrong. You didn’t do anything wrong, sweetheart! And nor did Eddie! He was just - you know, troubled. His trouble met your trouble and it’s like it all just blew up. It’s...it’s all....oh!”

Maggie broke off into hiccuping cries, pressed into the backs of her knuckles. Her shoulders shook in her clean cotton pyjamas. Richie couldn’t feel much of anything about what she’d just said. That was the hole’s fault, he guessed. It was kind of fucked up that had happened, that a piece of him had cut out with Eddie, that said piece of him was nearly all of him. That you could think you had learned something or that it was who you were and it was all just piggybacked off the boy you rode your bike to school with. 

He didn’t have the will to get angry at his mom. Richie didn’t have anything. All he could do now was lay back ‘til he thumped the headboard and let himself gape. 

School made it a little better, or a little worse. That’s when Richie started to feel the breeze on his face again, on Monday morning. His dad drove him in fifteen minutes too early and kissed him on the cheek within full view of at least twenty people. Early was the worst time to get there. Less kids in the halls, sure, but that only meant you could hear what they were whispering about a little crisper. And the whispering after Eddie “Screw-up” Kaspbrak had come to some horrible, mysterious end on a horrible, mysterious tour of the south with Richie “Huggies” Tozier could probably not be described as whispering at all. It was much more like banshee screaming. 

Something about sudden death and gym first period seemed to work quite well. Richie got to the locker room first, for the only time in his life, but the whispers got in soon enough. Two boys from the higher ability set came in soon after and stayed on the opposite side of the room to him, lolling on the bench. One was making some shooting motion while he whispered. He was wearing a hockey jersey. 

“You’re gonna have to remember sneakers at some point, you know, your feet are gonna get too big to borrow mine,” was the first thing anyone said directly to him all day. Ben Hanscom. Running fifteen minutes late and visibly horrified by Richie not running twenty. “You should put it in your diary.”

Richie hugged his knees to his chest, picking at a twinkie in his backpack. “Once you get to sixteen you stop growing,” he said thinly. 

“I’m doubtful. You eat a lot of greens and vegan food.”

“I haven’t eaten vegan food in, like, six months. I’m just smart. I tip it down my sleeve then bike to Pizza Hut.”

“Your _sleeve_?!”

Ben dressed really fast, so there was a lot of weird hovering, ‘cause Richie hadn’t really moved a muscle. Neither of them wanted the other to leave yet. Richie pulled out his broken basketball shorts half-heartedly and Ben’s shoulders relaxed. “Did you…” Ben started, in a tone Richie was becoming conditioned to squirm over. “You...like...talk to anybody or whatever?”

Richie dumped his pants on the floor a bit too heavily. Made Ben flinch. “I’m talking to you right now.”

“About any other stuff, though.”

“I talked to my dad about airplanes before I got here. You know there was this hijacker a couple years back that -”

A nervous little groan came from Ben. He’d swept his gym bag up to stuff in his locker, which meant Richie was going to have to haul ass, and scrunched his lips in frustration. Which meant Richie was going to have to cut it out. “Cops, Richie,” Ben squeaked. He did a scan of the room behind his shoulders and, upon deeming it empty and safe enough, stared at Richie pleadingly. “Did you talk to any cops yet?” 

Richie hadn’t. He was hoping, once again like a kid, that wasn’t going to need to,. That’s where things were going to get really weird. They’d probably want to go off looking for a body or for a murderous Frenchburg driver that didn’t exist. Even if Eddie really had died, he wouldn’t want that. He’d wish they would all just leave him alone. “Nuh uh,” Richie said after a beat, hitching his shorts up. They were bright red and moth-eaten. A second of staring at them, funnily enough, willed him into adding, “I’m gonna head home.”

“You - what? You just got dressed!”

He looked back up at Ben, whose face had a tortured crumple through it. “To get my sneakers. No offense but yours are a little, like, grandmother-ly. I don’t know how to feel about the flowers.”

“Richie…”

“Joke. That was a joke.”

“Maybe you should take the rest of the week at home too, then,” Ben went on as though he hadn’t heard him. There was turning out to be truly nothing Richie could do to stop everybody nurturing him, from now on. Nothing he could do to stop needing that. “Just come to terms with some things and rent some new videos or something...play some Paperboy...God knows - I could do with that.”

Richie turned to fidget with his bag and scrape all the Twinkie crumbs off it, embarrassed. Ben had been Eddie’s best friend just as much as he had. Nobody was treating him like some bruised, frail little bird, nobody was pestering and prodding him. All the puppy eyes and ‘are you alright’s only served to make Richie more and more _alone_. So he said, “I’m meant to have a fever anyways,” and walked off out with his bangs in his eyes. 

He headed home in the sun and listened to that same song Eddie did in his bedroom. Barely a week ago, weirdly. _Son of a Gun_ by the Vaselines felt suddenly like an old wartime record. Richie was feeling creeped out by almost everything, sneaking out the fire exit and down the spooky little lane at the back of the playground. Life without Eddie was creepy. 

It occurred to him once he hit the main roads, horribly, that he should have just done it. They should have run away together. He’d stayed here ‘cause he was trying to keep his life in one piece and only proceeded to shatter it into sixty. 

Only left himself even more yearning, even more longing to be laying sunburned and mosquito-bitten on Hawaiian sand, next to Eddie. Richie stared at the trees and pictured himself laying on his tummy while Eddie copied the sounds of the waves, leaning over him softly to reach for ice cream, sunscreen, something light. Eddie dipping down to Richie’s gritty shoulder to plant the world’s most gentle, sweetest, easiest - 

_HOOOOOOONK! HOOOOOOOONK!_

The daydream exploded like a firework. Richie flinched, recalibrating. He wasn’t in Hawaii. He was alone on Sweetpea Avenue with his backpack straps slipping.

Alone, save for a dirty, grey truck. 

Those backpack straps slipped all the way down to his wrists and he felt the most powerful strike of tiredness he’d ever felt standing up, as the rasping thing slowed to drive right beside him. Derry Beaver bumper sticker on the door and a Guns ‘N’ Roses one beneath it. Bird shit galore. It was Todd Silvetti’s Hellhound Honda. 

“Well, well, well!” Came a caw out of the slowly rolling window. “Do my eyes _bereave_ me, or is it Huggies back from the dead?!”

Another said: “Fuckin’ aye, I think it is. And he’s wearing shorts.”

“Yeah - nice shorts, Tozier! Although I don’t really think you got the right body type for ‘em. Why don’t you stop over and let us give you a ride to the mall?!”

Ah. Fuck. 

Richie had never felt so little equipped to deal with this in his life. And he’d dealt with it in eighth grade. “Deceive,” he muttered, drained, as Todd’s full face came into view. His head was freshly re-shaven and there was a new scar on his forehead. The same amount of cronies he always rode with - Brian, Kenny, Michele - but there somehow seemed to be more each time. They somehow all grew bigger. 

“What you say?” Todd said, in that awful theatre tone. Michele Van Saun was sitting in the passenger seat and laying her head on this shoulder like this was terribly romantic. 

“Deceive. You said ‘my eyes bereave me’ but it’s _my eyes decei-_ ”

Something sucker-punched Richie’s open mouth. He coughed a little, hitching his bag up and looking down to where it fell, between his non-gym-suitable green sneakers. It was a - “Diaper?!” Richie whipped his head back up incredulously. A breeze snapped his hair around his ears. “Oh my God. You for real went out and actually bought diapers?!”

“You wet yourself yet or what? We could smell you all the way up the road. It’s how I always find you, you know.”

“You’re so fucked in the head, Silvetti. You get about forty in those packs.”

Sure enough, Todd had an entire torn-open family pack of Huggies Diapers under his arm. He brandished it at the window ledge to make his friends cackle. “I know, right, you’re so leaky I had to spend extra.” 

“I’m just trying to get home.”

“All on your own.”

Richie vaguely noticed now that the leering boy was working at his door handle, and was about to climb out. Only vaguely ‘cause that weird blast of tiredness was amping up. Out of nowhere his eyelids were starting to really, properly drop and Todd was stomping his strong feet on the sidewalk behind them.

He stood so close Richie could smell whatever greasy carton he’d just eaten his lunch out of. Todd leaned in to take a deep sniff. “Oh, Christ almighty,” he yelped with his nostrils flared. “You need to be _changed_ , Huggies. Urgently!”

Richie, now alarmingly close to passing out, didn’t hear the others laugh. Didn’t hear them all clambering out too, a flounce of leather jackets and torn up jeans. He tried to elbow Todd away but just sort of jerked his arm. “You seriously need to get over me,” he slurred. “We haven’t had a class together in _years_.”

“Hey, no need to be embarrassed. You’ve had a rough weekend. Just at least own up to it.”

“Get the Hell away from me.”

“Just own up to it, Huggies. Just say ‘I pissed my pants again’ loud and proud.”

In what was probably the weirdest split second of his life, Kenny McKinley all of a sudden lunged for him like a bull, and tried to yank the waistband of his shorts down. Richie’s instincts kicked in like a spitfire. He kicked so hard his hip made a popping noise. So hard he’d hit Kenny square in the balls, and made him keel over. 

Laughter, gasps and curses all in one gale. Richie was half-conscious and now circled. In danger. Some little voice in his head told him to look down at the concrete.

“What - _the fuck_ , Tozier?!” gritted Kenny McKinley from the ground. 

“What the fuck Tozier? How ‘bout what the fuck all of you?!” Richie half-screamed, following the voice in his head. There was a huge, grey branch sitting loose on the curb and he swiped it up like an axe. “Trying to pull my fuckin’ pants down?! Like some kinda - kinda -“

Todd wiped his mouth with a fist. “Someone’s got to change you up.”

“ _Please_ tell me you see how weird that is. Like, that you actually hear yourself. You’re genuinely crazy.”

“I heard you liked crazy.” 

There was no time to think about what this meant. Or no room, really; half of Richie’s brain had shut down and the other half was full of that little voice again. It was clearer this time. Eddie’s voice, sure enough. Coach engine rumbling soft underneath it as it said in a perfect imitation, _you let them get in your head_. 

Kenny was getting up again with fresh vigor and Richie shook his branch wildly - “don’t touch me!” - trying to stay focused. Funny. When Eddie had said that to him, it was probably the most hurtful thing he’d ever heard. Just now it felt grounding. It felt like an instruction, even: _get them out of your head Richie. Get in_ theirs. _Fast_. 

“See - see, what you guys don’t realise is,” Richie blurted on a whim. “The reason I went to Kentucky is I...saw a world specialist. And I got a super expensive operation. So you don’t even have anything to make fun of anymore.”

This went down like an anchor. Todd merely snorted, leaning back against his truck, almost like nobody said anything. Michele was picking another diaper out of his wrapper and giving Richie a lazy stink-eye. 

“So I guess you’ll just have to find some other fucker to follow around all the time,” he went on. Richie’s legs had gone bandy. Socks were falling down. “Because that’s no longer me. At all. Whatsoever.”

“If your pee surgery was so crazy then how come you went to school?”

“Well, that’s why I’m heading home. My scars are gnarly. If you try and pants me they’re probably gonna bleed all over you.”

“Jesus fuck, Huggies. How are you able to say all this without getting embarrassed?”

Todd slouched forward and Richie swung his branch, violently. The little Eddie in his head seemed to like that. _You can fight if you need, you know_ it was wittering fast. _He’s hurt you enough. I don’t like it when he hurts you_. Richie, spurred on, cocked his chin up. He gave Todd the slowest and sharpest once-over he could muster. “Why? You jealous?” was his uneven little jab. 

The group snickered. Even Kenny with his broken balls. “How could anyone _ever_ be jealous of you, Richie?” Todd guffawed. 

“You tell me. I always see you chugging while you guys are driving around. Hardly ever stop for a bathroom break between torturing me, no. I’ll bet you just do it in your pants. Bet you wish you had my surgery.” 

“Huggies has lost his mind, folks. First the bladder and now the -”

“The first other kid to have a bad day’s been all you’ve talked about for the last four years. Even when we don’t go to the same school anymore. I’ll admit, it’s a smart coping mechanism. Put all your shit on Richie Tozier and treat him like a fucking dog so you don’t have to do it to yourself. It’s neat, the way the brain works.”

Something unusual flashed across Todd’s face. Not fear, obviously, never fear. Not genuine understanding or any realisation. But it was something. And it made Richie’s psychic Eddie Kaspbrak cheer like a _lion_. Todd stalked as close to Richie as he could without getting the crooky end of a branch in his eye, face taut with this weird, new light and half a leftover smirk. “You’re disgusting,” is all he said. “No surgery’ll fix you, you know. I’ll never leave you alone.”

Against all his anxiety, and hopelessness, and closeness to surely dropping dead any minute, Richie grinned. “Who are you talking to?” He asked, in his boldest voice. And with his boldest lunge - which was admittedly not that bold, but was helped by how close he’d drawn in Todd - Richie used his weapon to whack him hard. Fair and square. Right in the middle of his bladder. 

A couple seconds of whirring silence. Todd stumbled and spat. Michele swooned on him, shrieking as though he’d been shot, Kenny and Brian all but cowered. Of course, Richie was only left a few heartbeats to bask in this. That’s all Todd needed for his last fuse to light. He rocked on his tiptoes, and punched Richie in the face. 

The sidewalk might as well have been iron. Leaves and gravel scraped under his shirt. But it still felt like a triumph.. He was hysterically giggling through a nosebleed while, somewhere under the thumping in his ears, he heard a high-pitched, _’Todd - is that - Todd! Is that piss on your pants?!’_ , and letting himself pass out. Wishing more than anything he could call Eddie about this in bed later, tell him he’d won.

Wishing Eddie could know somehow that he’d been right. After everything he’d got it right. 

Richie was gonna be alright on his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sobs...as you read this i will be officially writing the final chapter of this fic. i feel like my own freaking kid is moving out for college.
> 
> i listened to the song freedom by alex g and the whole winner album a lot while writing this if you are looking for some richie pain vibes!!!


	12. landline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warning for blood, heavy death talk (a funeral scene), and a passing reference to a suicide.

Stanley was not a particularly good nurse, and had nothing close to a bedside manner, but they were gentle. Wearing a sweater much bigger and baggier than anything they usually wore and hands smelling like a vet’s waiting room; the sight of them patiently unwrapping a band-aid on Richie’s bed that night was like something out of a miracle. 

It was dark out. You could smell through the open window the whole block was setting up for dinner. Richie only had an hour and a half more to fix everything before his parents would be home to do the same. 

“If you squirm and it all goes wrong,” Stan was saying in a low voice, bottle of rubbing alcohol sloshing in their lap. “You legally have to forgive me straight away.”

“I’m not gonna squirm.”

“And what was that when I touched your nose, like, five minutes ago?”

Richie rolled his eyes. He was in some position that he thought was up on his elbows but was really just an awkward sprawl. “You didn’t touch it,” he said thickly. “You _jabbed_ it. I am a human being.”

Getting home had been a long, dizzy struggle, after Todd hit Richie on Sweetpea Avenue that day. He hadn’t gone properly unconscious, luckily. Wasn’t from the punch either. Apparently his fever was very much real and he hadn’t slept at all since Kentucky. Richie had laid on the sidewalk so long mostly because it just felt nice to lay down. Then the left half of his brain had flickered back into action fifteen minutes later, leaves stuck in his socks, nose swollen like a jelly pop. He’d walked home looking like _he_ was the dead one. 

By the time he got there he almost wished he was. Richie tripped over his shoelaces at the top of his road and shredded his knees open, which was agony, and he’d apparently lost his backpack in the scuffle. But these things had turned out quite little in the end. 

Standing at the gates of his own front yard, like a man back from war, Richie remembered everything he had ever hated about Derry. Everything he had breathed free from over the last week. Every birthday candle wish for his parents to up and leave it, to pack Eddie in his suitcase and unclip him in Los Angeles, Paris, planet Jupiter. ‘Cause the steps up to the front door were covered in yellow spray paint. And broken glass. And dirt. His mailbox was a splintered pile of wood. 

Wreck.

He stared at it totally empty for a few seconds. Feeling the blood dry on his chin. Knowing all of a strange sudden that all the break-ins had been meant for him. All the bad was meant for him.

Todd, certainly. The stupid fuck had taken four tries to find Richie’s house and given him the worst welcome home gift in all history. Upon realising this, Richie let himself breathe again, and a small, flat scream came out with it.

That’s how Stanley Uris had entered the equation - sheer panic. He’d made a beeline for the kitchen phone, sneakers crunching in the glass and rubble, and gotten snot and blood all over it. Richie thought he’d call his mom first. Her schedule was too tight and important for her to ever get to leave work early but he thought her voice might somehow sweep the place clean. Said voice never came, though. Horrifyingly, the second the ringing died out, all Richie got was:

“You’ve reached Sonia Kaspbrak’s landline. Sales and crank calls will all be reported. If you have something to say, please -”

He smacked it back down into its socket. Oh, God. Richie’s bruised fingers had dialled Eddie. They always dialled Eddie. 

That was the only thing that could have made all this normal, after all. Calling Eddie over and waiting for the hiss of his bike-wheels, sat rocking out on the curb. Showing Eddie his wounds like some sort of cartoon soldier and pretending every remedy he’d try on them hurt terribly just to piss him off. A universe away, now.

Imagining this put Richie off the idea of talking to his mom entirely. So he’d called Mike Hanlon instead, who didn’t go to Derry high school, and asked him to come with Stanley Uris, who he could pick up from Derry high school. He’d also told him to bring his grandpa’s first aid tin and a roll of trash can liners. Then he hung the phone up, dusted his shirt down, and while waiting for his friends he cried. 

It wasn’t Richie’s mess to clean. But somehow he was guilty for it. And so he’d sat at his bedroom window and watched Stan and Mike sweep the whole front of the yard like a pair of mice, whispering to each other as they went. This was not such a threatening kind of whisper. He knew it’d only be ‘you think Richie’s alright?’, ‘do you think Todd did that to his nose?’, ‘is he gonna cope with a funeral?’, and he didn’t particularly want to hear it anyway. Richie just watched their double act play out with his eyes half-closed. 

“I don’t get how you got all these cuts from just a punch,” Stanley was saying after they’d finished cleaning, hovering a cotton wool bud over Richie’s chin. They had a point. The blow had been swift and barely bone-breaking and yet Richie had come out of it looking like the final girl of a slasher movie. “Sure he wasn’t wearing some kinda...a knuckle duster?”

Richie didn’t really know how to respond to being dabbed at. Just slipped his glasses off and watched the wall. “I fell over a bunch.”

“But it was only one punch…”

“Other times today though. Like, I’ve been clumsy.”

The cotton wool paused right over a little nick, stinging. Richie flicked it back over with a thumb, and his eyes over to Stanley, who had their lips pursed. “I’m always clumsy,” he said firmly. “You said it yourself.”

This was convincing enough to stop Stan from saying anything, but apparently not to stop them from whipping around to Mike in the corner. A worried flutter of eyelashes passed between the two of them. Talking in their heads, probably, like Richie and Eddie used to do. Telepathy. A wrinkle of the nose could state something life-changing if you knew its owner well enough.

“You’re not going to school again this week, yeah?” Mike said at the end of it, stepping up from his awkward perch. There were half-red leaves on his sneakers. 

“Not unless I get _really_ bored. Or my brain starts rotting. I’m the kind of person that needs to keep a skill constantly active if I don’t want it to just -”

“Richie. Just say you’ll stay home.”

“Right, yeah. Okay.”

Stan cleaned all the dark, crispy parts off Richie’s cuts and put band-aids on the biggest ones. They left his face warm and sticky as if they’d just given him some sort of baptism. Then came the dirt in his hair, toothed out with a comb, which was when Richie felt closest to crying. A knot of it came out loose on his pillow. Still fragile from the bleach. For some reason, this was what made Richie understand seriously that he was sick, and very lonely. This was what woke him up. 

What made Richie understand that he needed to actually voice this: Stanley finishing up their work, drying Richie’s face roughly with the paw of their sleeve and saying casually, “I miss Eddie tons.”

It hadn’t been trying to pry anything out of Richie, or to baby or suffocate him. It was honest. Which was apparently all he had been looking for. So he bit the soft corner of his lip and blinked anything dangerous out of his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

Stanley dropped their sleeve and looked down. “Kentucky was good?”

“Not really. Cool to get out of here, though. Hear some...um...some new accents.”

“Was Eddie your boyfriend or something?”

Richie had been letting himself get so comfortable in this conversation he almost nodded wildly, even though it wasn’t true; he stopped his head so violently a zing of pain ran down his neck. “What? Did someone tell you that?” He hurried, pushing himself up off his pillow further and taking his blankets with him. There was still blood on his shirt. It occured to Richie for a moment that he probably looked crazy. “Is that what people are saying?”

Stan shook their head fast, fingers whipping back. “No! Nobody, I - I just wondered about it.”

“Mourning somebody makes me gay for them?”

“You must take me for a nutjob. I definitely don’t mean because of that.”

Despite this implying it was because of something else, something huge and age-old, Richie didn’t ask what. He was listening to his own ragged breathing and trying to figure it out for himself. The image of Eddie holding him back at the motel in Pennsylvania flipped through his head, moonlit and lonely, Eddie yanking him ankles-first out of the back of Sam’s truck. They had been made of something cosmic. They had let that something go. 

“He wasn’t,” Richie said distantly.

“The stage before boyfriend, or whatever?”

“Stan.”

“It’s okay, Rich. It’s all okay. And especially okay because...well, ‘cause - me and Mike are gonna be gay too.”

Richie blinked. Mike had strode forward some more so that he was now hovering over Stanley’s shoulder and both their backs were straight as rods, slightly frightened. Had their widest eyes on. “You’re gonna be gay,” Richie repeated slowly, sending a relaxed little coil through the two. 

“Yeah, you know. Like dating but when it’s...um…”

“When it’s us,” Mike finished. He gave Stanley a gentle pat on their sweatered shoulder and looked vaguely like he was blushing. “We’re going out together. But not telling anybody about it.”

Stan smiled their first smile of the evening down at Richie’s bedsheets. “‘Part from you, of course.”

Oh. That made sense. There was probably something a little cosmic there, too. Something Richie had been too selfish and jealous to acknowledge before. He was feeling selfish and jealous again, just now. Almost angry. Angry that he was bedridden and bloody and Stanley was wearing their brand new boyfriend’s sweater, grinning lovesick. Able to dip in and out of this, able to head home in thirty and switch off from sad old abandoned Richie Tozier, on to whatever they and dreamy Mike Hanlon were going to share for dinner instead. Richie madly let himself think this would be the last time they’d ever want to hang out not just alone together. 

He’d probably become a drag on this love, too. Just like he was on his and Eddie’s. 

Alas. A good start on avoiding that was likely not being a miserable fuck. This was meant to be a silver lining, after all. Something to cheer him up and remind him of the fact love existed even in the bad times rather than that it existed all the time for everyone but him. So Richie said, “you guys look cool together. It’s cool,” in a gargled voice. And, thank God, as Mike threw himself to hug him around the neck, he heard his mom’s car pull up home.

-

Richie’s nose wasn’t healing. It was only a little bit broken, but enough to make the whole thing look wrong. He stared at it in the mirror for forty minutes straight that weekend. The weekend John, his oldest brother, came home from college and his grandparents stopped in for good measure too. The weekend of Eddie’s funeral. He’d been sent upstairs to spruce himself up and could only despairingly stare at how _wrong_ all of him was.

It wasn’t really a proper funeral. Eddie’s mom wasn’t going to be there. She was going to organize her own in a broken to pieces mess and die herself before Richie Tozier attended it. So Maggie was calling it a farewell party instead, and it was happening in the Toziers’ backyard.

Casual but still depressing. That was what Richie thought his mom might have been going for. He’d padded downstairs in a black sweater, unsure of how it had ever spawned in his wardrobe in the first place, right at the last minute. Precisely as suitcase-laden John Tozier had opened the door with his hip and announced, “someone ordered the most good-looking member of the family, or what?!” at the top of voice.

Maggie, hovering by the stairs, rushed at him with a despairing look on her face. Her navy tea dress fluttered like an anxious moviestar’s. “John. _Tone_.”

“Hello to you too, Mom, I missed you more!”

“Please keep your voice down. It’s a funeral.”

John’s wildly inappropriate exuberance was not the weirdest thing about him just now. At least not to Richie. He was used to his brother being like that. Used to him being happy and brash all the time and himself being madly jealous of it. Today, however, his focus was on John’s apparent plus one crouched below his shoulder - a girl.

“Girlfriend,” John had seemingly corrected Richie’s thoughts. He was unzipping his boots while the girl shyly climbed in and fixed the latch on the door, shutting the breeze out. She was short and ash blonde. “Can’t believe you’re all gonna meet my girlfriend. This is Kate.”

Maggie’s expression was a whirlwind. Davey was crawling out of the shadows in his freshly ironed pants and Carl snorted from the wall behind him. “Kate. Your girlfriend Kate.”

“Yeah. Say hi, Kate.”

“Hi K- oh, hi, missus Tozier.” Kate smoothed down her blouse, which was very much not black, but bright pink instead, and leaned to shake Maggie’s stiff hand. 

This was somewhat typical of John. He was the kind of person that fell into a lot of awkward conundrums yet always managed to come out better for them. That could slip in the hallways ten times a day and girls would just coyly describe him as ‘goofy’, giggle at him, that could lose every fight yet look rugged with the bruises. Kate from college would be no different. She probably had some stunning eulogy poem up her sleeve and she’d perform it on the patio and make Grandma Tozier cry. John grinned as if praying for this as his mom shook with the girl cautiously. 

“Nice to meet you,” Maggie said, after a particularly satisfying once-over. “This is David, Carl and Richard. John’s little brothers.”

Kate looked over the three brothers dizzily, eyes fluttering longest on Carl. Picking a random guess. She leaned in and held her curls over her chest. “Hey, I am so...so sorry about your friend,” she whispered, green gum on her tooth. 

Carl’s face crumpled sarcastically. “Thanks. I’m Carl, though.”

“You’re not the one?”

“No, Richie.”

He pointed to the end of the line of brothers and Kate followed, embarrassed. Gave Richie’s shoulder a pat but was too desperate to turn away to follow through with it. Maggie shot him a smiley grimace. And bizarrely, it made him laugh so hard his throat burned. 

John and Kate’s presence became more and more morbid as the afternoon drew on and Richie became more and more hysterical over it. They held hands under the table, while they all ate sandwiches. (Corned beef - Eddie’s favorite). It made him snort Pepsi out of his nose in giggles. This was all rather funny, after all. A fake funeral that they weren’t allowed to call a funeral and was essentially just a ‘Richie get over it’ party. Everyone dressed up proper to stare at the grass. Richie having fallen in love with the only person he was ever going to come across that wanted to fake-die-flee to some remote Hawaiian island. This life had turned out a sick joke. 

That last part was what really made it morbid, Richie figured. That John was not in love with some troubled teenage renegade. Neither was Stan or Mike. Neither were any of his friends, all sat in the living room just now, teary-eyed, lied to. They were sad but they were still young and had things to grow into. Richie was surely ninety-nine years old, by now. He was done for.

He knew Eddie wouldn’t have wanted him to think that way. Might have even teased him for it until he stopped. Richie sat out on the curb after his mom read some embarrassing poem over lunch, one of her meditation tape songs playing in the background, and tried hard to picture that. Eddie teasing him. He stared at the concrete next to him and willed his own eyes to see a hand there until they watered. 

Come on, brain. Just five fingers. Freckled and tanned. Drawing the shape of a kitty cat on top of his own, just like they always did, just like how always made him feel better. Just like how first made him really, properly realise that - 

“Richie?” Came an uncharacteristically soft voice.

The block was empty - Sunday afternoon, autumn cold starting to creep in - and it had been quite silent before this. Silent enough for Richie to have let himself start crying again. He flinched and turned around with a fist over his left eye to see John through the right one. 

Oh, God. Of course he’d gotten bored. Careless fuck. “You’re walking out on a funeral?” Richie said, throat itching, turning back to the road. 

“Because you’d never do that…?”

“I’m allowed to. It’s my dead person.”

“I feel like that makes it even worse.”

John padded lightly up behind him, until Richie could see his shoes next to his own. His big brother never grew that tall. He always felt big, though. Solid. Intimidating. Richie squinted up at him to see his face had changed a little since he left for college. It was weathered, now, some color around his eyes and cheeks and hair on his chin. Richie would probably start to look like that soon. This whole thing would probably have him bald by thirty. 

“What happened with your nose?” John asked. Richie touched over said nose and realised all of a sudden how directly they were staring at each other. Ducked his head down by his knees instead. 

“You already know ‘m clumsy.”

“Yeah, but. Not _that_ clumsy.”

Something weird and light came over Richie for a moment, as the breeze picked up. Something that made him lie: “I started a fight.”

A surprised little flicker ran across John’s face. “Oh. Damn.”

“Since I got back from Kentucky I’m just...different, you know. I don’t have time for people’s everyday shit anymore. This kid in my grade, Todd Silvetti, he was walking way too slow in front of me...always so slow...I hit him. He hit back obviously. But then I hit again.”

John lowered himself to sit next to his little brother, wind whipping his short, dark hair around his ears. They still had thin ridges on them from when he used to wear glasses, like Richie’s. “Wasn’t it a Todd that used to beat on you, a while back?” He said mistily. 

“A while back,” Richie repeated. “And it was a different one.”

“I see.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Ignoring the obvious. Now that Richie thought about it John was probably sent out, by his mom or dad or someone else who still had hope was randomly going to open up. Which he wasn’t. He couldn’t open up without spilling at least one major, life-ruining detail: that Eddie was not dead at all, or that he was so in love with him that this didn’t even matter. That it was all a lie but might as well not have been ‘cause Eddie was gone and Richie never got to kiss him properly and he was probably going to be stuck on pause for the rest of his life. 

So, no. Richie was not going to tell his brother anything close to the truth. He could tell him something, though. Something wild John could jet back off to college with like the fight. He looked over at him again, and John gave a hopeful grin. 

“Eddie,” Richie said in an odd voice, practically feeling John’s muscles coil. “Eddie was my boyfriend.”

Silence. As expected. John didn’t nod or blink or really show any sign of having heard Richie at all. More like a dormant video game character than a shocked brother. Richie took advantage of this to keep swinging further - “he was my boyfriend. He had been for a really long time too. Kentucky was like...like, it was like our honeymoon. Practically.”

“Oh.”

“It was tragic lovers. I think...I think some might even say he walked out in front of that car on purpose. Because our love was very, um, tragic.”

Still nothing. Apart from a little twitch of the hand; John was reaching for his pocket, eyes gone dark. Richie had some wild daydream for a moment that his brother was gonna swipe out a gun or a rock or something and kill him. He didn’t, of course. But what he pulled out was equally strange. It was an envelope. 

“I don’t know what you’re caught up in, Richie,” John said gravely.

“Wait - what?”

He pressed the envelope into Richie’s palm and looked at him with exceedingly white eyes. “I saw it, when I was taking my shoes off and getting everything in,” he went on. Air was getting colder and colder. “I knew mom was gonna open it if she saw it before you. Maybe even dad. Thought it was just from one of your buddies and now it feels...like...If you’ve - if you’ve been lying to _cops..._.”

Richie looked down at the envelope, which now looked like it was made out of water, for everything was going very dreamy. Like the corners were dripping off into the gravel. His address was printed into the corner of it with neat, thin crayon but the ‘for Richie’ over the centre looked written by a child. He suddenly got the skittish urge to drop it. 

“I didn’t lie,” Richie said thinly. His dad was playing one of his records back in the living room and the swell of it made him jump out of his skin. Dark Side of The Moon, it sounded like. _Any Color You Like_. The top lip of the envelope was coming loose. “I didn’t lie. I swear, I didn’t say anything that…”

John had a fist over his mouth. “Are you sure, Rich?” he said, in a tone that warped his words into _shouldn’t you have a look first?_. 

There were bright colors, behind that lip of card. A sunny printed picture. A postcard. Richie’s thumbs managed to quiver it out far enough to see some weird, suburban little bay, pink flowers growing by the sidewalk. ‘Thinking Of You!’ up over the clouds and sunshine. He felt so nauseous all of a sudden he shoved the half back inside. 

“Richie,” John said. 

“Why are you trying to catch me out?”

“What?”

“I - I’m grieving and you’re trying to, like, frame me for something. It’s really sick.”

John shook his head, reaching a hand out for the postcard. Richie whipped it away like an angry cat. “I’m not. I’m just...I don’t think anyone realizes you and Eddie had a whole _secret_ thing going on, you know?” He tried. “And now you’ve got, what, a penpal too? Another boyfriend? Freaking me out is all.”

The first few specks of rain hit Richie’s shoulders. He could feel something in his belly ruching. Crushing and growing all at the same time. “I’m just gonna throw it away,” he said through gritted teeth. 

“Don’t, Richie. Just read it.”

“No.”

“Please read it.”

“I...not with you here.”

This ultimately confirmed something. That he had lied, or that there was some other secret, or that he was being a real brat. Something dreadful. But John listened to it. And magically, he was shuffling away on his ankles. “I’m here for you, you know,” he was saying as he backed up. The second from last statement of the day to almost make Richie inexplicably, scorchingly burst out laughing. “But you _can’t_ lie. About...about yeah.”

Richie wasn’t listening anymore. He was staring at the print on his lap as if whatever was on the back of it might kill him. 

(Which was not all that unlikely). 

John’s footsteps were blending in with all the bass-guitar twirls and slow drums his dad hadn’t figured out how to turn down. With the wind and heartbeat and the drizzle. Funny, Richie felt all of a sudden like he could have predicted this. Like he could have known since the day he was born the height of his life would look just like this. 

His cheeks were turning purple. He flipped over the card. He knew. 

_Dear Richie,_ it said.

There it was - the final laugh. Richie let himself laugh for the last time today, numbness travelling from the tips of his fingers up his arms. It wasn’t hysterical this time. It was completely justified. 

_I fucked it up in the wardrobe. I want to try again._

_Please come home._

_Yours,_

_Whiskey_. 

And Richie understood. Through crinkled, wrinkled eyes he knew exactly where he was going - or at least how he was meant to find it. The postcard fluttered to the concrete and his dad’s record needle reached the end of the vinyl. His glasses fell to his teeth. He followed Eddie Kaspbrak his whole life, followed him like the Jerusalem star, followed him like God. He followed him to Kentucky and then he followed him beyond the grave. 

Naturally, cosmically, Richie would follow Eddie _home_. And he would stay there this time. He was going to live there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well here we are guys. i managed to get this whole love story out without getting distracted. the crowd goes wild!!!!!!!
> 
> AGH I AM SO SAD TO BE ENDING THIS it took me so long cuz of college and still had to be rushed for the same reason so if you see me changing this chapter around every time I miss it...do not prosecute me. but alas. already working on a new reddie fic and am so so so happy with this one so it’s all good. this summer has been rough and insane for me and writing this has been my primary coping mechanism. i am sooooo proud :D :D
> 
> feel free to follow my twitter also it’s meowrichie! and see you all soon!!!!!

**Author's Note:**

> kudos & comments extremely appreciated!


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